House of the Dragon’s Red Keep seems so bleak because it’s lost all its dragon sex art
Milly Alcock returned to the role of Rhaenyra Targaryen (via a Harrenhal-induced vision) in the last few episodes of House of the Dragon. And so did the thing the Australian actress once called the most surprising bit of House of the Dragon set design: the pornographic frescoes at the Red Keep.
“We’re walking around. We [Alcock and co-star Emily Carey] look up and we’re like, Huh… that’s interesting,” Alcock said in a 2022 roundtable ahead of the first season. “The tapestries of men and women making love; women and women making love — dragons making love, in the mix as well, with humans there. But like everywhere.”
If watching season 2 (or even season 1) of House of the Dragon didn’t feel like a non-stop parade of dragon sex frescoes, don’t worry; surprisingly they scan as pretty subtle on the show when they do show up, which is increasingly rare. Production designer Jim Clay said this was an intentional choice, in an effort to make it appear as if the luster has left the Red Keep in Aegon’s (and Alicent’s) tenure.
“The Targaryens are a family of immense power, and control, and incest,” Clay told Polygon. “The Red Keep — it was a sort of decadent place under [Viserys]. And then his wife died, and [...] Alicent’s influence was a little more puritanical and monastic (despite her own activities).”
The style was like the rest of House of the Dragon’s art, what Clay calls “essentially medieval.” (Though he notes he does “try to introduce elements that are not purely Renaissance, just so we change it up a little bit so it’s not familiar British or European Renaissance buildings.”) He credits season 1 showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik with the idea for the pornographic art as a means for showing how indulgent and even soft life was under Viserys’ rule. But it was Clay who enlisted artist Steve Mitchell to do the artwork for the show.
“Steve can do anything, from a small fresco to a huge, 200-foot-long backdrop,” Clay says of Mitchell’s work (which is also
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