If you’ve been watching House of the Dragon Season 3, now airing on the 2026 TV schedule, you know Aegon Targaryen has never had an easy ride in the prestige streaming series. But this season has put him through a very different kind of misery. After how Season 2 ended and everything that happened to him, the king is not only emotionally wrecked. He is permanently scarred by dragon fire, and his body is broken. That created a very specific acting problem for Tom Glynn-Carney, the actor behind the fallen monarch. He had to remember that Aegon now lives with a limp and, apparently, that was easier said than done.
Glynn-Carney talked about playing Aegon after the character was left permanently injured and disfigured. The actor explained to People that Season 3 required a major physical transformation every morning, but that aforementioned part of Aegon’s condition kept slipping his mind once he was actually performing:
I kept forgetting to limp. I kept forgetting about the fact that he'd broken his leg in such a horrific way that he'll now be permanently living with a limp.
It would be an understatement to say Aegon has so much going on that it makes sense Glynn-Carney would occasionally lose track of that one detail. After all, he's playing a king on the run, a wounded son, a bitter brother and a man clinging to power. Also, like so many of the best Game of Thrones characters, Aegon is someone whose entire body has been disfigured by trauma. Somewhere in that mess, remembering to favor one leg over the other probably becomes another plate to keep spinning.
So the actor came up with a solution that sounds simple, clever and deeply unpleasant. He told the outlet:
I ended up putting stones in my boot to remind myself to keep the weight off that leg. It's little things like that that were fun to play with. There is such a transformation that I go through every morning, which is a lot of fun.
Stones in the boot is a wonderfully miserable little trick. Despite seeming unpleasant and uncomfortable, the trick makes perfect sense. If your brain forgets the limp, your foot will remember for you. This is actually a particular acting hack I’ve heard performers using before.
This also says a lot about how Glynn-Carney is approaching Aegon now. Obviously, the limp is not just a bit of movement business. It's a reminder that the damage done to Aegon did not end when the flames went out. Every step tells the audience his body has changed, and that kind of physical detail can do a lot of quiet storytelling.
The makeup and prosthetics help too. Glynn-Carney explained that the intense work in the chair is useful because it constantly reminds him of Aegon’s injuries. That makes sense as well. It has to be hard to forget what your character has survived when your face and body are being transformed before you even step onto the set.
What's interesting is that the actor still describes the process as fun. He teased a richer narrative for Aegon this season, saying viewers will see different versions of him and that Aegon may use his brain, and maybe even check in with his heart, a bit more than before. That is part of what makes Glynn-Carney’s Aegon so watchable. He is awful, or at the very least, has been awful in the past. He’s damaged, funny, needy and dangerous, sometimes all within a few lines. Now, with Aegon physically diminished but still obsessed with regaining power, the performance has a new kind of tension.
Aegon may still want the Iron Throne. But thanks to a few stones in Tom Glynn-Carney’s boot, every step toward it hurts as it should. New and explosive episodes of House of the Dragon drop Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO, before becoming available to stream with an HBO Max subscription.
