War is raging at the Warner Bros. lot in Leavesden, a suburb a short train ride from London best known as the place where families decamp for a day to see the Harry Potter film sets. But tucked away from the tourists, past a checkpoint that requires signing a pile of paperwork, you’ll find a rustic medieval village occupied by battling armies, partially set on fire, and — thanks to the intermittently spitting rain — slathered in mud. In the immense downtime between scenes during my visit this past September, the crew of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon trudges among plastic tents serving as makeshift production offices. In some, writers huddle under blankets in chairs watching playbacks of action sequences. In others, background actors adjust their chain mail and faux furs and clutch prop weapons, some of which are designed to explode and splatter blood on impact. And finally, in another tent, doing his best not to muss up his intricately engraved suit of armor, there’s James Norton, gleeful as a schoolboy about to hear the bell for recess.
If you’ve watched enough British television, Norton’s face is immediately familiar; his prominent square jaw has emerged over a stiff collar in many a period drama. He’s been a suitor in Little Women, a cad in The Nevers, and a tragic soldier in War and Peace. That jaw, sharpened to a knife’s edge, can also be lit from some angles to capture the menace of a psychopath, which he played to great acclaim in the brutal procedural Happy Valley, or the gusto of a brawler in a series like McMafia or House of Guinness. If you haven’t seen much of him before, you’ll still probably think, Wow, that’s a distinctly handsome and distinctly British man.
