If you made a list of “love to hate” characters from House of the Dragon season three, the despicably slimy yet deliciously campy Ormund Hightower would have to be at the top. After pretending to surrender to Daemon Targaryen and handing over a fake Daeron Targaryen, complete with hair bleached that telltale shade of white blonde, Ormund marched to Tumbleton and occupied the town.
From afar, he fueled a vicious anti-Rhaenyra sabotage campaign in King’s Landing. In his day-to-day life, he loomed large over young Prince Daeron, whom he’d raised and targeted with his control-freak tendencies. Ormund could never rule, so he focused on Daeron instead, the most Hightower-like among all the potentially eligible Targaryens.
In building out the character, actor James Norton made all the right choices when portraying Ormund’s many quirks, including a very hot temper, a tendency to vomit when faced with real danger, and an obsession with only inhaling pleasant aromas. But in the season finale, “The Treason at Tumbleton,” we got to see Ormund in full-on battle mode. And, well… hoo boy.
He’s no slouch with the sword, as it turns out. But he’s no match for Roddy the Ruin, the leader of the Winter Wolves, who sets his sights on him and gives him a wound that will live on in House of the Dragon infamy. It also includes one of the show’s greatest all-time one-liners.
Ormund does lop off Roddy’s arm. But any joy in that for him is ruined when Roddy’s blood spurts all over his face, a nightmare for anyone, much less a confirmed germophobe. And Ormund doesn’t even really have time to react because just then, Roddy shoves a blade into his backside, bellowing, “That’s a proper fucking… by the North!”
It’s gory as hell. But also hilarious, and that was the idea.
“There was a lot of fun around the idea,” Norton told Entertainment Weekly. “Initially, there were multiple thrusts. Then I think there was a consensus that that was probably a little too much. In a lot of the stuff in House of the Dragon, you take it to an extreme, you find where the parameter exists, and then you put it back a bit.”
A lot of planning went into getting the moment just right. “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. There was so much conversation around which angle the blade enters into Ormund’s asshole,” Norton said.
The actor thought it was “quite sweet” that Ormund and Roddy meet their final end at the same moment, as Silverwing the dragon (ridden by the treasonous Ser Ulf) lights up Tumbleton. “He happens to have a dagger currently stuck up my ass, but that’s sort of a detail by the by,” Norton joked.
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