James Norton Opens Up About His Wild ‘House of the Dragon’ Death Scene

James Norton is opening up about one of the strangest death scenes in House of the Dragon. The actor, who played Ormund Hightower, spoke to Entertainment Weekly about filming the Battle of Tumbleton and the unusual way his character met his end in the Season 3 finale.

Warning: spoilers for the House of the Dragon Season 3 finale follow.

Ormund does not get the kind of heroic death some Game of Thrones characters receive. During the battle, he comes face-to-face with Ser Roderick Dustin, played by Tommy Flanagan. After a brutal fight, Roderick loses an arm but manages to stab Ormund in the rear. The scene was clearly meant to be shocking, but Norton said the cast and crew also had plenty of fun figuring out exactly how to film it.

“There was a lot of fun around the idea,” Norton told Entertainment Weekly. According to the actor, the original version of the scene was even more extreme. The stunt team filmed several possible versions before deciding to pull things back.

“Initially, there were multiple thrusts,” Norton said. “Then I think there was a consensus that that was probably a little too much.” Norton explained that this kind of process is common on House of the Dragon. The team often pushes a scene as far as possible before deciding what works best for the final version.

The battle itself took weeks to film because of how many different pieces had to be coordinated. Norton said the crew filmed several versions of the fight between Ormund and Roderick, including different versions of Roderick’s missing arm and different types of stunt knives.

“We had to shoot so many different versions: one with [Roddy’s] arm, one without the arm, one with the real blade, one with the small blade, one with the floppy blade,” Norton recalled. The actor even joked about how much thought went into the awkward death. “There was so much conversation around which angle the blade enters into Ormund’s a–hole.”

Ormund’s death also includes another memorable moment when blood hits his face and causes him to vomit. Norton said that part was filmed at the end of an extremely hot day when the production was running short on time. “We gotta get this. We can’t f— around now,” he remembered the crew saying.

The blood effect was not nearly as glamorous as it may have looked on screen. Norton said stunt coordinator Rowley Irlam stood nearby and manually threw blood from a pot onto his face.

Despite the strange details, Norton said the final death scene was never played as a joke by the actors. He wanted the moment between Ormund and Roderick to feel serious before the humor naturally came from what was happening. Norton described the two characters as an “odd couple” who end up facing the same fate together.

As they wait for Ulf the White to unleash dragonfire, Ormund and Roderick look toward the sky together. “There was something quite sweet that Tommy and I, looking the same direction at the same inevitable fate happen,” Norton said.

Then came the obvious problem. “He happens to have a dagger currently stuck up my ass, but that’s sort of a detail by the by.”

For Norton, that strange combination of violence, drama and dark humor seems to perfectly capture what made Ormund such a memorable part of House of the Dragon.

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