Blood and Cheese speak! Inside ‘House of the Dragon’ season 2’s gruesome moment

Warning: This article contains major spoilers from the House of the Dragon season 2 premiere, “A Son for a Son.”

For more than a year, actors Sam C. Wilson and Mark Stobbart couldn’t tell anyone that they landed roles on House of the Dragon season 2. That was by design. Their characters, Blood and Cheese, are involved in one of the most tragic events to befall any character from the world of Game of Thrones, the assassination and beheading of 6-year-old Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen. Series co-creator Ryan Condal wanted to preserve the pair’s introduction as much as possible.

“We spent a lot of time casting those guys, but we didn’t want to make too much of a ‘here comes this twisty thing from the books’ and make it feel like a gimmicky thing,” Condal tells Entertainment Weekly. “That was definitely us trying to protect this moment. Everybody knows it’s coming. People are waiting for you to play the hits. Sometimes you have to do a little bit of misdirection so that it is revealed in a satisfying way.”

This particular hit arrives in the season 2 premiere, the title of which is derived from a well-known line from George R.R. Martin‘s Fire and Blood: “Make it a son for a son.” Plagued with grief, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) declares before her war council, “I want Aemond Targaryen,” her half-brother (played by Ewan Mitchell) and the one responsible for the loss of her son, Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault). Rhaenyra’s husband and uncle, Prince Daemon (Matt Smith), interprets that in his own quintessentially Daemon way (perhaps intentionally) and hires two sell swords to exact the queen’s revenge.

One of them is a member of the Gold Cloaks with a disdain for the Hightowers and loyalty to Daemon. He will be known to the ages as Blood. (The book originally describes the character as an ex-Gold Cloak.)

“When I got there, the director [Alan Taylor] made some allusion to, ‘You are the guy with the voice,'” Wilson, an actor from Amazon’s Hanna and CBBC’s Dodger who does indeed have a comparably booming voice to his character, tells EW over a Zoom conversation with Stobbart. “Yeah, it is this deep, but I went a bit further for Blood. I think that he had to sound totally terrifying for it to make sense as to what he ends up doing, which is not good.”

The other is a rat catcher with gambling debts who works in the Red Keep. History will remember him as Cheese. There’s technically a third member of this group: Cheese’s dog. Wilson and Stobbart have a laugh over the canine actor being more famous than either of them, since it’s the same dog who played the main pup in Disney’s Cruella. (“We were nothing compared to this dog,” Stobbart jokes.) Not much is known about these characters in Fire and Blood. Martin writes, “Their true names are lost to history.” But with writing from Condal and performances from the actors, they became fleshed-out figures in the lexicon of Game of Thrones.

“It came through a director I’d done jobs for before,” Stobbart recalls of the audition. “I didn’t have any inkling as to who it could be. I didn’t know the world. There was a name. Sam, can you remember what the names were?” Wilson starts typing into the search bar on his email inbox to find the answer. “It was Charlie!” Stobbart continues. “It was Borris and Charlie instead of Blood and Cheese.”

Those weren’t the only tactics used to keep these characters under wraps. The sides the actors used for the audition had different dialogue. Instead of “going to kill” a royal prince, it read “going to kidnap.” Instead of “the Queen’s quarters,” the scene was set in “the Prince’s quarters.” Wilson ended up flubbing the lines when he finally got to set and saw the actual scripts: “I realized I was saying the lines as I’d learned them in the audition.”

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Stobbart also remembers the job calling for “decent comedy chops,” though Wilson says, “that disappeared pretty quickly. It really developed through the shoots with the things we were talking about with Alan, with Ryan. I remember auditioning for it with more of a twinkle than what ended up being on screen. From the bits I’ve seen, it’s a lot darker than the job that we accepted.”

Blood and Cheese have their orders: sneak into the castle disguised as rat catchers and kill Aemond. Though it doesn’t occur on camera, it’s clear Daemon gives them a stipulation: should the one-eyed prince remain at large, they should kill “a son” instead. And because, of course, Aemond isn’t around, the assassins haphazardly find themselves in the nursery where the royal twins, Prince Jaehaerys and Princess Jaehaera, are sleeping. Cheese holds their mother, Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), at knife point and threatens to kill them all if she doesn’t point out the male heir.

The events are far more gruesome in Fire and Blood. The way Martin wrote it, the Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (played by Olivia Cooke on House of the Dragon) is present and there are three of Helaena’s children instead of two, all of which are awake and forced to bear witness. Blood kills the bedmaid and guard; Cheese rapes Jaehaera when the queen takes too long to pick which of her children to kill; and when Helaena finally succumbs and chooses her youngest, 2-year-old Maelor, Blood beheads Jaehaerys instead, leaving Maelor with the knowledge that his mother wanted him dead.

There are a few factors as to why the series doesn’t strictly adapt the scene this way. For one, the show is on a slightly differently timeline than the book, which means Maelor hasn’t been born yet and the other two are even younger than Fire and Blood depicts. “Maelor does not yet exist on this timeline because 30 years is compressed into 20 years,” Condal says.

The other challenges stemmed from the logistics of utilizing child actors. “We knew that we would be challenged to get performances out of children that young — as a person who has kids around these ages, I’m intimately familiar with all of that,” Condal says. “Then there are things that you can and cannot expose children to on a movie set. If you were to try to perform a faithful rendering of that story, you’d be challenged from all angles in terms of getting a performance out of a child. A lot of times it seems like the kid is going through that, but you’re using clever cutaways and insert shots.”

When Blood covers Jaehaerys’ mouth in the episode, for example, it’s actually the kid’s father wearing the glove, not Wilson. The death itself then happens off camera; blood splatter and sawing sound effects accompany Helaena as she flees the room with her daughter. “We stood around a cot with a doll,” Stobbart says. “Watching it is far more shocking than you could ever imagine, but in the grand scheme of filming it, it was like any other job.”

Given the practical obstacles in their way, Condal went back to the basic elements of what needed to be accomplished: Rhaenyra wants revenge, Daemon goes out to see it done, but it’s fuzzy in the book as to what Rhaenyra specifically asked for and what Daemon demanded. “What we wanted to do was make a visceral sequence that satisfied the beat in the book, but also played in a reality that worked for our television audience, many of whom would not have read the book,” Condal says. “We wanted it to play a bit as a dark Cohen Brothers heist sequence that takes a terrible twist at the end of it.”

“It was always about losing control and then being in a position where we have no choice but to do what we set out to do because there was no escape,” Wilson remarks. “It ends up being a crime of incompetence on the show, and I think that’s where it differentiates from the book. It ends up being two utterly incompetent hitmen.”

Though their roles are relatively small, Wilson and Stobbart contemplate their place within the larger history of Game of Thrones, adding Blood and Cheese to the roster of tragedies like the Red Wedding and the burning of Shireen. “Being a part of it, you just hope it lands for the people that it matters to,” Wilson points out.

“People are going to have a really fixed idea of who Blood and Cheese are,” Stobbart adds. “I want people to watch it and go, ‘That’s who I saw when I read the book.’ That, to me, will be a job really well done.”

New episodes of House of the Dragon air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.