House of the Dragon Season 2 has gone a long way to illustrate the differences between the Greens and the Blacks of the Targaryen family tree, and the Episode 3 scene with Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) in the King's Landing brothel really showed off the current messiness of the Greens. It was a complex sequence for the brothers, and according to director Geeta Vasant Patel, it was also complicated to film. She shared a detailed breakdown with CinemaBlend and her intent to handle it differently than Game of Thrones might have.
This of course wasn't House of the Dragon's first brothel sequence, as Aemond's actions continue to parallel Daemon's from early Season 1 and Rhaenyra quite memorably was brought to a pleasure house by her uncle/future husband before the time jump. But the latest brothel scene had me flashing back to the Game of Thrones days of sexposition, which was so prolific that there was a supercut of nude scenes well before the show even ended. I'm not against nudity or sex scenes on TV – could I watch Outlander if I was? – but when it didn't serve the story on Thrones, I didn't love it.
So I wasn't flashing back because the brothel scene of House of the Dragon's third episode felt like it was straight out of Game of Thrones, but rather because the sexual acts and nudity didn't feel gratuitous in the ways that they often did – to me, at least – on the original series. (Remember Littlefinger's scene that was inexplicably set in one of his brothels with naked women around him while he monologued? Or what Emilia Clarke has said about nude scenes and how Jason Momoa helped her out?)
So, when I spoke with director Geeta Vasant Patel about how the Episode 3 sequence was filmed and how Ewan Mitchell felt about it, I noted that I didn't get the same gratuitous vibe that I often did from Game of Thrones. She responded:
Well, this was my first orgy scene, and I agree with you. I feel the same way. I never saw my parents kiss. I'm not sure I've ever seen my parents kiss, because I'm Indian and we're very conservative. This whole thing was very funny to me because I'm reading the scene, and I don't like doing nudity or sex scenes and stuff like that. [laughs] I looked at it and thought, 'We need an orgy. We need an orgy because it's all about story.'
Not many TV scenes really need an orgy to support the storyline, but Aegon and his cronies dragging an uncomfortable squire through a brothel so that he could – to quote the king – "get it wet"? That qualifies. The director went on about adding the orgy, citing her collaboration with cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt:
A young man is being taken into a brothel and they're trying to shock him. They're trying to give him this first night out, and all the guys are excited about it. And a brothel is a brothel, so one thing that I really paid attention to was bringing a brothel to life, knowing that at that time, and in that time, people were kinky. They still are! [A brothel] is not a conservative place to go to, and so that was part of it. But the most important thing that Catherine Goldschmidt and I worked on as we planned it was letting it not be about the sex and letting it not be about the nudity.
Catherine Goldschmidt, who also shared her take on House of the Dragon's "Cock Inn" location, and Geeta Vasant Patel framed the orgy and the brothel to be about the story of Aegon... and eventually, both Targaryen brothers. The director continued:
So I spent weeks working on what the oral sex should look like, what the orgy should look like, how many people, everything. However, when we went in there with a camera, we just raced through it with our characters, and if you saw the orgy or not, who knows? But it's there, and I think what's really important to me as a director is I'm trying to just tell the story of these guys walking through. There is something he sees, we see [the oral sex] through his point of view, but after that, we're now in Aegon's head. Aegon is now just looking for his brother, and so even though he passes an orgy, we don't sit there and cover it. We just keep going until we find Aemond.
Now, viewers may have seen Aemond confiding in a prostitute earlier in Season 2, but Aegon clearly could not have been more surprised to open a curtain and find his brother in bed with the first woman he'd ever been with. And Aegon... well, he didn't exactly treat Aemond with any dignity, which is certainly a choice to make about a man who rides Vhagar.
Rarely has Aemond been so vulnerable as he was when he was suddenly faced with his drunk brother and his guards in the brothel, and not just because he was fully nude and not wearing his eyepatch. The director unpacked the scene further:
Aemond is in a place where he was bullied when he was younger, and since he was bullied, he has created this persona of someone who does not care about anything. In that moment, when he is caught in the brothel, the child in him is woken and when Aegon keeps pushing, there's a shot where you see Aemond in the foreground and Aegon in the background just continue. He's barking like a dog in the background, and I feel like you can see Aemond's armor coming back on. He is becoming the persona of someone who doesn't care.
While I may support Team Black and have limited amounts of sympathy for Aemond after Luke's death, could anybody really watch that and not feel bad for him? Credit to Tom Glynn-Carney for continuing to make Aegon interesting in Season 2, but Ewan Mitchell made the brave decision to film fully nude on camera as Aemond walks away. Geeta Vasant-Patel praised the actor, saying:
When Ewan and I were talking about that scene, and I said to him, 'Look, I'm not someone who's all about nudity. So whether you want to do it or not is up to you. It'll still be a great scene. I know it will.' And he said, 'No, I think it's important.' And so we did it. He got up, he was fully nude, and I felt and he felt like it was powerful.
It remains to be seen if this encounter between the brothers at the brothel affects them as the season continues, and this second season will be shorter than the first. Fire & Blood readers may have some idea of what's likely to happen before the wait begins for Season 3, but House of the Dragon has made plenty of changes from George R.R. Martin's source material.
If you want to revisit Episode 3 after getting the director's take on this particularly memorable scene, you can find it streaming with a Max subscription. New episodes of House of the Dragon air on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
