Ormund Hightower (James Norton) has been raising cousin Daeron Hightower (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) since he was a baby. The youngest son of Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Viserys (Paddy Considine) was introduced with some trickery in House of the Dragon Season 3 with the help of a fake Daeron (Charlie Gordon), but Episode 4 revealed the harsh reality of Daeron’s life with his uncle, one that echoes Alicent’s relationship with her recently departed father, Otto (Rhys Ifans). Norton explains everything you need to know about Ormund in the video interview above.
Does Ormund see Daeron as his son? “I think so, yeah,” Norton tells TV Insider.
“There’s not much said about Ormund in the books. We know enough about him. We know that he had a wife. There was a family in Oldtown. But I do think that Daeron is the most important person in his life at this point,” Norton explains. “Obviously, this has been a plan for some time.”
Norton believes that it was vital for the Ormund-Daeron relationship’s believability to show some real love between them, but a twisted one.
“One of the things which was really important to me from the very first conversation I had with [series co-creator Ryan Condal]…this relationship has to have love, has to be full of affection. I can’t be just entirely manipulative,” Norton says. “It has to be one of those really psychologically abusive and toxic but also really complicated, conflicting relationships, because Daeron’s too bright and too competent to just suffer at the hands of an abuser.”
In Episode 4, Ormund has taken over the city of Tumbleton in a show of protest against Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’arcy) claiming of the Iron Throne. Norton describes his character as a religious extremist who views the Targaryen blood as tainted and the Hightowers as superior. Ormund believes that Daeron should be on the Iron Throne, and despite his “fascistic” beliefs that Targaryens shouldn’t exist. Ormund forced Daeron to execute an innocent man, marking the teen’s first kill. Norton explains the twisted psychology on display when Ormund praises Daeron’s violence.
“Some of the most important and exciting scenes were when I was able to clasp [Daeron] on his shoulders and tell him how proud I was of him. And I had Ben, who’s such a wonderful young actor, and he was looking at me with these misty eyes full of gratitude and love,” Norton explains. “The moment I’m talking about is when he kills someone for the first time, and afterwards Ormund tells him how much he loves him for it, how proud he is. And the reaction I had from this boy is like, ‘Thank you.’ All he wants is to be loved. Because he doesn’t have a father figure in Oldtown. Ormund is his father, so yes, I think it is father-son and it is also abuser-prisoner. It’s Stockholm Syndrome. It’s all sorts of stuff going on in that relationship, which is why it was so exciting to explore.”
Ormund is obsessed with Hightower history in Oldtown and believes that his family should rule. “The way to describe him is like a zealot or religious [fanaticism],” Norton tells us. “He’s sort of fascistic in his view of the superiority of the Hightowers. It’s almost like eugenics. He says to Daeron, ‘Your blood is tainted.’ He sees the Targaryens, the dragons, and their riders as savages and that it is a crime to the Iron Throne that they should be sitting there.”
He has a “very binary way of thinking,” Norton adds. “There’s no nuance in the conversation, which is also why his relationship with Daeron is so interesting, because the ‘savage’ and the Hightower coexist in this one boy, which is the future hope for his kin, for his lineage, and yet he represents both. So you would expect Ormund to have had a more nuanced approach to Daeron’s coexisting of his two families, but he doesn’t. He’s just like, ‘That part of you is tainted. That part of you is savage. We just ignore it.’”
Learn how Ormund judges Alicent for her Targaryen proximity and hints of what’s to come later this season of House of the Dragon in the full video interview above.
House of the Dragon, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO, Streaming on HBO Max
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
