Director Geeta Patel explores Daemon Targaryen’s unstable headspace in the latest episode of House of the Dragon. How much is him and how much is newcomer Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin)?

In the latest episode of House of the Dragon, “The Burning Mill,” Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) heads to the huge, rain-soaked castle of Harrenhal to raise an army on behalf of his wife, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy)…or at least that was the plan at first. The episode before, Daemon and Rhaenyra had a monster fight where she called him out for always being selfish, and for marrying her less for love and more because it put him closer to the Iron Throne…and also she didn’t like that one of his revenge schemes led to the murder of a young child. He’s got a lot of knocks against him.

When Daemon leaves, it’s not clear if he and Rhaenyra will be getting back together. What we know is that Daemon is messed up when he gets to Harrenhal. “[W]hat’s important is that Daemon gave his heart to Rhaenyra. He married her when he’s not a marrying kind of guy. He doesn’t let anyone in, but he let her in. And she, in episode 2, pushed him away and told him he was dirt; he was ugly. That hit him like a bullet, and he doesn’t take bullets,” episode director Geeta Patel told ScreenRant. “Daemon is a guy who just broke up with his wife. She’s called him every name you could think of, and he’s drinking; he’s angry. He wants to cut somebody, or maybe he wants to cut himself. He’s done.”

“Matt [Smith] and I talked about how he just came from being pushed away by the one person he let in. He’s embarrassed; he’s hurt. He told himself he would never let himself feel this again. As he’s going through the hallways, it’s not about, “What’s going to come around the corner?” It’s, “I don’t know where I am anymore on the map. I don’t know who I am anymore. I hate myself. I hate my life. I hate that she did this to me. I want to kill her.””

This results in some unhinged behavior. For instance, after Daemon lands at Harrenhal, he expects to be resisted by the castle garrison, headed up by Ser Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale). But Ser Simon is perfectly willing to bend the knee to Rhaenyra and give over governorship of the castle to Daemon. Even so, Daemon is out for blood, and he beats up a soldier who wasn’t offering up any resistance. Apparently that was Matt Smith’s idea. “[I]t’s scripted that the guard sees him and then runs away,” Patel revealed. “Matt did it, then he came up to me and goes, ‘I just want to beat the hell out of that guy.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I want you to.’ He said, ‘That’s me. That’s Daemon.’ We didn’t have a lot of time as usual, so we did it the way it was scripted, but then we did it this way as well. And it wasn’t just, ‘Beat the guy up.’ It was, ‘Feel everything you want to feel. Where you came from.’ He just kept going, and that’s what made the cut in the end.”

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In addition to beating the crap out of people who are on his side, Daemon also starts having bizarre dreams. In one of them, a younger version of Rhaenyra Targaryen shows up, played by Milly Alcock. “[I]n that dream, she looks at him — and the way we talked about it is she doesn’t need to say anything. We just worked on the look; the meaning that comes from all the episodes before she looks at him, and she cuts him,” Patel said. “She says, ‘Hey, you killed a boy. You don’t do that.'”

“People have said that to him all the way through. But when young Rhaenyra says it to him, it’s the first time he feels it. It’s the first time he processes his actions, though he’s been killing people left and right since the beginning. This is the first time we see him regret. We see him feel. We actually kept talking, in between takes, about how this is something we’ve never seen before in Daemon.”

Once again, Smith was very involved in shaping these scenes, asking for multiple takes to get Daemon’s reaction right. “He was really such a hardworking actor on this, and all of a sudden I saw his face break after Milly looked at him,” Patel said. “I just saw his hands loosen, and I saw the tear in his eye. Then I had a tear in my eye because we both felt it. Even the crew got emotional at that moment. And it wasn’t about House of the Dragon, it was about making a mistake that you deeply regret that hurt somebody else. It’s just that simple. That’s what I love about working on this show. I like to think that it is a documentary with dragons. We always try to make it feel real; like something we can relate to.”

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Actor Gayle Rankin talks Alys Rivers

There may be more than just regret and self-loathing at work here. Daemon briefly meets a new character named Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin); her first words to Daemon are that he’s going to die in “this place.” That’s unsettling.

We haven’t dug deep into Alys’ character yet, but in George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, she’s something of a local mystic. “On House of the Dragon, we have dragons, obviously, but she’s the first entry point to that world of magic,” Rankin told Entertainment Weekly. “That made me excited. I was definitely carrying that energy with me.”

“I’m not totally sure what I’m allowed to share, but I too was intrigued and excited about how open the character was. I really love the challenge of a woman being recounted as some people say this and some people say this. I’m always fascinated by and drawn to female characters who are tossed around by society and culture. I really tried personally to make her my own and ground her in reality, because you can stereotype someone who’s a healer or a sorcerer or a witch or any of the above.”

On Game of Thrones, some characters really could wield magic, most notably the Red Woman Melisandre. But they were few and far between. Fire & Blood leaves it ambiguous just how magic Alys really is, but Rankin has grand ambitions for her. “This person can tell the future, basically,”she said. “She’s someone who has all of this power, who’s been alive for potentially 400 years. How do we make her a person with a beating heart and wants and desires? I hope that’s felt inside of our exploration with her. They’ve done such a wonderful job by giving these characters, especially the female characters, a 360 experience, which isn’t always the case, instead of these really patriarchal stories.”

“She’s going to hold a lot of power for the men inside of this story, especially Daemon, which I think is a really interesting slow burn. What’s interesting is, what does Alys want from Daemon and vice versa? What are they learning from each other? There’s clearly a match happening here.”

Matt Smith as Daemon Targaryen and Gayle Rankin as Alys Rivers in House of the Dragon season 2 episode 4 /

We’ll see more of Daemon and Alys when House of the Dragon returns for another new episode this Sunday night on HBO and Max.