Who is the Tom Cruise of Westeros? This is not a rhetorical question to spend hours arguing about with your friends at Buffalo Wild Wings before you angrily walk home after eating one too many cheese curds. There’s an actual answer: on a dragon, it’s Baela; on land, it’s Rhaenyra. Let me explain.
House of the Dragon director Geeta Vasant Patel talked to The Washington Post about the influence a pair of Tom Cruise action movie franchises had on season 2 of the HBO series. In episode 3, “The Burning Mill,” Baela is riding on Moondancer when she spots Criston Cole and his un-merry men and chases after them. Unfortunately, they duck into the woods before the dragon can set them on fire and enjoy some cripsy Criston jerky, but at least the scene helped showrunner Ryan Condal understand Baela as a character.
“We were trying to explore what Baela’s personality was. Ryan was experimenting with different angles. And one day he came in and he said, ‘She’s Maverick,’” Patel said, referring to Cruise’s character in Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. The risk-taking actor (who is closing out the 2024 Summer Olympics by jumping out of a plane, because of course he is) inspired another scene from that episode, when Rhaenyra sneaks into King’s Landing to talk with Alicent.
A later scene in the episode, in which the show’s heroine Rhaenyra sneaks through King’s Landing, was modeled after Mission: Impossible. Instead of Rhaenyra finding her way through the capital city with ease, Patel directed the scene into something Ethan Hunt-ish in which Rhaenyra has to evade guards, slip behind walls, and even wear a disguise. “And then we ran with it and expanded what was like three lines of a page into a day of shooting, because we just expanded into something very suspenseful,” Patel says.
Which Tom Cruise movie will the season 2 finale be influenced by? If Daemon starts singing a Bon Jovi song, we’ll know the answer.
(Via The Washington Post)