House of the Dragon may have just started but we already know of its first deleted scene, although it’s a mystery whether we’ll ever see it. Would you like to have seen more of Alicent’s reaction to her betrothal to Viserys before jumping three years into the future? Would you like to have seen the wedding, or at least the wedding day? You’re not the only one: the producers must have agreed at some point, as a scene was shot for “The Rogue Prince” with Alicent wearing her wedding dress.
All of this started when hairstylist and make-up artist Tania Cooper shared a number of photos her Instagram of her work on Emily Carey’s hair and look for Alicent’s wedding day in “The Rogue Prince”… which, as you may recall, we never got to see. It would have had to happen between the betrothal and Daemon’s closing scene with Corlys in Driftmark, but we never even glimpsed the wedding day… until now!
“This masterpiece was from a scene that never made it,” Couper explains alongside the photos, including close-ups taken by make-up artist Natalie Wickens. “One of my favourite days working with [Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon hair designer] Kev Alexander. The creativity was bouncing of the walls, pin tail combs at dawn!”
She also writes: “The dress, the hair, the tiara… such a shame it didn’t make the edit. Cutting room floor,” she laments. “Sad times, Emily Carey. Sad times indeed. House of the Dragon, why you do me like this?” She adds this is her “second favorite look” she did for Alicent Hightower.
I don’t know much about fashion—you’ll have to wait for Hogan McLaughlin’s veredict on his Game of Threads feature, if he decides to cover this cut scene—but that’s a beautiful dress, and quite interesting with those leathery wings making a ‘V’ on her chest. Alicent may be a Hightower but her wedding dress announces her as the queen of the Targaryen dynasty, with dragon wings and what appears to be a subtle repeated pattern of the Targaryen sigil on the bottom half.
Emily Carey showed her support for the dress and Couper’s work on her Instagram stories, saying Couper went “quite literally above and beyond” for Alicent’s wedding look, and shared a funny photo of herself eating with a bib, which she had to wear while wearing the dress.
Finally, “The Rogue Prince” director Greg Yaitanes shared the following image on his own Instagram stories, taken from the day of the shoot for this deleted scene, accompanied by his own comment: “Captured moment that didn’t make the final cut of episode 2,” Yaitanes writes. “I watched this dress get made from the moment I landed to the moment we put it on camera. The detail was astonishing.”
The director’s contribution to this developing story clarifies what the cut scene is, and more importantly what it isn’t: it isn’t a wedding ceremony like the many we saw in Game of Thrones, with hundreds of people, food, and pomp and circumstance (and deaths, though that’s rarely in the wedding plan.) Reportedly, the scene involves Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) helping Queen-to-be Alicent (Emily Carey) put the dress on and asking her whether this is what she truly wants.
Hopefully this scene is included in the season one Blu-Ray boxset extras, because I’d love to see it, even if the producers didn’t consider that it fit on their final cut. If it’s not included on the Blu-Ray either, I wonder whether this is worthy of a #ReleaseTheWeddingDressCut hashtag campaign, or is that going too far? Yes, probably too far!
