Matt Smith keeps trophies from his acting career. He’s particularly proud of the talking Cyberman head from his breakthrough role as the Eleventh Doctor from 2009 to 2013. “I’ve got my costumes tucked away too. I won’t even fit into them now.” I’m disappointed to learn, though, that Smith didn’t keep the fez that led to the best line Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat wrote for him, namely: “Fezzes are cool.” “Fezzes are cool,” Smith deadpans to me now. “That came about because I said it would be good if the Doctor wore a hat, so he kept writing more and more outlandish hats for me to wear.”
Smith’s latest trophy is the sword of Daemon Targaryen, the blond-haired, sadist, misogynist and power-crazed antihero of Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, which returns this week.
“I nicked it last day on set. I’ve got that, but none of the armour – because it is really expensive. I’d have a red dot on my head if I’d left the studio with that. The snipers would have shot me.”
The helmet is particularly covetable because of its protruding cheek flaps. These hide so much of his face that Smith has to make his lower jaw and mouth particularly expressive when, for example, trying to oust the current incumbent of the Iron Throne, he leaps off his dragon and enters Castle Harrenhal to demand the fealty of Simon Russell Beale’s Ser Simon Strong. Which, to be fair, Smith does with aplomb.
Sartorial considerations are clearly important to Smith, the actor GQ decided in 2018 was Britain’s best dressed man. Today, he sits opposite me wearing what fashionistas would call a statement top, a loose-weave cashmere sweater that looks to my eye like woollen chainmail. “I don’t know who designed it,” Smith says, lifting up the back of the jumper so I can examine the label. It turns out the top is designed by Loro Piana, as are Smith’s smart trousers and boots. The jumper is so transparent that I notice Smith is no stranger to the weights room. Evidently, one needs to be buff to play a sword-wielding, cod-medieval psychopath.
But why did Smith take this role? After all, when he Zoomed producers back in 2020, he had misgivings that a spin-off from George RR Martin’s lucratively adapted novel had a future. One Naomi Watts-fronted Game of Thrones prequel had already been cancelled. He feared, too, that TV audiences were less likely to be captivated again by what Game of Thrones veteran Ian McShane called its recipe of “tits and dragons”.
“I had the same feeling when I took Doctor Who. And my agent was like: ‘You’re doing it!’ Thank God I did. It changed my life. To this day, it is just the most brilliant of jobs.”
Why did you dither so much? “The way to make an actor unhappy is to give them a job, because there’s self-reflection. Like can I enjoy it? My dad used to say to me when I told him I wasn’t enjoying this or that aspect of work: ‘Bloody hell, son. It’s work. It’s not meant to be enjoyable all the fucking time. Get on with it.’”
He was also nearly waylaid by another plan: following Karen Gillan, who played his companion Amy Pond in Doctor Who, into a successful Hollywood movie career. Part of him yearned then, and dreams now, of being not just an actor but a movie star like his heroes Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves. “I was gonna move over there. Sometimes I look back, and maybe I should have literally just gone after her. And then things happened. I got in a relationship here and I ended up staying.” His relationships include model Daisy Lowe and actor Lily James. Now when I ask him about his life in London, he says: “It’s all right because I get to be with my dogs.” (The anchor of his life currently is his Irish terrier, Bobby.)
Fortunately, House of the Dragon proved a huge success. Each episode of the first series averaged 29 million viewers in the US alone. Smith’s performance was critically hailed, not least because – like Milton’s Satan or Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister – he was having more fun with his diabolical antics than the good guys. “One of the gifts about a character like Daemon is he does things that are, on occasion, pretty unthinkable.”
Smith felt the same way when he played the cannibalistic, necrophiliac serial killer Patrick Bateman on stage a decade ago in the American Psycho musical. “I kind of liked him,” he says of Bret Easton Ellis’s murderous banker. “On some level there’s got to be something you can link on to.” Smith reckons he did just the same when he played the less diabolical Prince Philip opposite Claire Foy’s Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. Although no royalist, Smith liked the maverick prince despite his unreconstructed views. “I fell in love with him a bit, having thought, like a lot of Britons, that he was one thing: a bit of a buffoon.”
He was drawn to the Duke of Edinburgh’s psychic wound: the fact that he was destined to play second fiddle to his wife. Strikingly, in House of the Dragon, Smith plays another prince in the shadow of a powerful woman. When Daemon’s older brother, Paddy Considine’s King Viserys, died in season one, he left the Targaryen throne not to his young sibling, but to Viserys’s daughter Rhaenyra, played by Emma D’Arcy. Bad enough to be usurped – but by a girl? Intolerable, certainly in the patriarchal milieu of House of the Dragon.
“I mean, if we just had a bit of group therapy in House Targaryen, there probably wouldn’t be a show,” he laughs.
Smith describes his character as an “agent of chaos” and doesn’t demur when I suggest that makes him sound like a tooled-up Nigel Farage. “Yeah, he’s there to cause political unrest. What gets his heart racing is scheming and chaos and madness and violence. It’s the sins of the fathers, isn’t it?” And perhaps the sins of the mothers, too? Smith nods. “I don’t think we ever hear much about his mother. I guess she just forgot to pick him up from school a couple of times.” Just to be clear, he’s talking about Daemon’s origin story, not Farage’s.
“Ultimately, Daemon, whatever else he is, is a human being. He’s got his own perverted sense of justice and morality. It’s just different to our own.” Very different indeed. Daemon is not just a psychopath in a platinum blond wig. He is also married to Rhaenyra, his niece, and so in an incestuous relationship akin to that of the Targaryen siblings in Game of Thrones. “It’s one of the great taboos,” says Smith of the incest theme. “And people often say: ‘Do you think it should be represented?’ But that’s what’s in the books. And, actually, when you look back through history, it probably was far more prevalent than we ever really give it credit for.”
Series three is already being plotted as we meet. Is it not constraining to be in a franchise like this? “I’ve done it before with Doctor Who, so no. The brass tacks of it is that I feel very privileged to be in a show that people actually turn up to see, because that’s not a given.” Happily, the series doesn’t take all his creative energies. He recently starred on the London stage in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and is currently working on a six-part TV series called The Death of Bunny Munro. “Let me tell you, that is an unholy tale,” says Smith of this adaptation of Nick Cave’s novel. “Bunny makes Daemon look like a pussycat .”
Bunny Monroe is a door-to-door beauty product salesman and self-professed sex addict who, after the suicide of his wife, is charged with raising nine-year-old Bunny Junior. “He’s having a mental breakdown essentially, and as he’s tumbling towards the abyss he’s left with his little boy – who thinks his dad’s amazing.” Yet again, Smith may well be playing second fiddle. “The kid is brilliant and it’s deeply frustrating when I’m on set as every day I’m outacted and outfoxed by a nine-year-old.”
Not that he’s complaining. Smith is lucky enough to have found one rewarding career after having to abandon another. As a teenager, he was captain of Leicester City’s youth team and seemed destined for a professional career – but spondylosis put paid to that. He could have had a very different collection of trophies than the House Targaryen sword and Doctor Who sonic screwdriver he keeps at home. Imagine if you’d carried on playing, I say. Now, you’d be retired and a Match of the Day pundit. “I think, actually, I might have become a manager,” Smith replies.
Instead, later this year, he will film season three of House of the Dragon. “We go again.” Smith’s destiny for the time being, he realises, is to go back into a studio filled with indoor rain to represent the dampest kingdoms of Westeros. He takes his dad’s sage advice about not moaning. “When I’m sitting on a dragon – which I’m ashamed to admit is not a real dragon – and there are wind and rain machines blowing at me for hours, you’ve got to think there are people doing jobs that are way fucking harder.”
House of the Dragon returns on HBO in the US on 16 June and on Sky Atlantic/Now on 17 June in the UK.
