James Norton Reveals Ormund’s ‘House of the Dragon’ Death Could Have Been Even Worse
‘House of the Dragon’ has never been shy about brutal exits, and its third season closed out with one of the show’s most talked about deaths yet. James Norton joined the show this season as Ormund Hightower, the villainous head of House Hightower who set out to overtake Rhaenyra Targaryen by grooming his ward and cousin, Daeron Targaryen, for the Iron Throne. The character quickly became one of the season’s most divisive and captivating additions.
Ormund’s arc built toward the Battle of Tumbleton, where his fate intertwined with fan favorite Roddy the Ruin, played by Tommy Flanagan. Ormund dies during the battle after Roddy the Ruin stabs him, and before he can escape, Ulf’s dragon arrives and burns them both alive. The sequence closes out a season that leaned heavily into the character’s cruelty and his complicated bond with Daeron.
Norton has now opened up about how that ending came together, and the details are more extreme than what actually made it to screen. While fans of George R. R. Martin’s book ‘Fire and Blood’ expected Roddy’s involvement in Ormund’s death, the added dragon element was a bitterly ironic touch that expanded on the source material.
According to the actor, the production originally considered pushing Ormund’s demise even further before scaling it back. Norton explained that he knew it was going to be a big, delicious death, noting that the show often pushes ideas to the extreme before pulling back once the boundary becomes clear, and that there was originally a version where Ormund gets impaled around twenty times, told to Variety.
Beyond the gore, Norton also touched on the emotional texture of dying alongside Flanagan’s Roddy. He described their shared death scene as oddly intimate, pointing out that Roddy was desperate to die while Ormund was not, which left the two locked together in a strange, almost preserved for eternity kind of finish, a detail he shared in a separate conversation with The A.V. Club.
Did you like how Ormund died?
That intimacy carried into Ormund’s relationship with Daeron as well, which Norton has repeatedly stressed was never just a power play. He said the key throughout Ormund’s journey was to anchor him and make him feel human through his love for Daeron, adding that however monstrous, villainous, cruel or callous the character became, his feelings for Daeron were real. Norton also suggested Ormund would have had a complicated pride in watching Daeron ultimately turn against him.
That psychology was something Norton had discussed even before the finale aired. He described some of the most rewarding scenes as the moments he could clasp Daeron on the shoulders and tell him how proud he was, pointing to Benjamin Evan Ainsworth’s performance as a boy desperate simply to be loved. It is that emotional groundwork, paired with an ending built on fire, betrayal and a stabbing to the backside, that has fans still dissecting Ormund’s send off days later.
Between the scrapped twenty stab wound version, Roddy’s grim double death and Daeron’s betrayal, Ormund’s finale gave ‘House of the Dragon’ one of its most layered villain exits yet, so which part of his ending do you think hit hardest?
