House of the Dragon’s sex scenes kick off with Matt Smith as the saddest boy at the orgy

polygon.com:

In a world where Game of Thrones made sexposition rampant, House of the Dragon has little choice but to follow suit. Though the showrunners have said they plan to “pull back” over time on prolific sex scenes that earned Game of Thrones a certain reputation, the first chapter of House isn’t a huge break from the tradition.

Matt Smith is the star who, in the pilot of House of the Dragon, gets saddled with helming two sexposition scenes, in very different ways. The first is your standard Game of Thrones fare: Daemon (Smith) is visiting his mistress, and he’s having trouble focusing because he’s stressed about his relationship with his brother. The second is more profoundly comical: Daemon rents out a brothel to reward his soldiers for a job well done. Still melancholic over a (different) run-in with his brother, he sits and sort of glooms until his mistress inspires him to make a speech.

Which of course leads to the whole brothel stopping what they’re doing — several of them very much mid-coitus — going quiet, and listening to his toast.

“Well I don’t think it’s exactly nice to be the saddest person at the medieval orgy, is it?” Smith laughs in a roundtable interview with Polygon. “But I think it tells you something about Daemon.”

And indeed, for all their situational comedy, they’re an example of how sex scenes on TV can be used to further the plot. The brothel scene is certainly one way of showing how devoted Daemon’s men are, and how much their relationship is, in some ways, built on mutual respect. And as Smith notes, each moment let him show another layer to his character.

“People keep saying he’s a villain and all this, and he does really bad stuff. That’s true. But I think deep down there’s a real sense of