Matt Smith is ‘House of the Dragon’s’ ‘agent of chaos.’ And he’s loving every minute of it.
“It’s an amazing show,” Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter in the most recent installment of our Dragonfly’s Diner series. “It’s been really fun. We’ve got a great cast, a really great director, great writer. It’s a great world to come out of. And I mean that in all the best ways.”
Smith is in rare mode — which is the only way he’s ever comfortable being “in rare mode.” When he was hired as the actor opposite MerylStreep in the blockbuster-penned and Oscar-nominated The Danish Girl, Smith, 29, was the hottest thing in Hollywood. And on Saturday, he tells THR, people will watch him again, in a new role: agent of chaos.
Smith spent 10 years teaching in the UK, and for 12 minutes a week, he’s been a director of an experimental theater company that stages plays about the “dark side of creativity.” And on the strength of the series, he says this is where he wants to spend the rest of his life. “As the head of a company that teaches plays about the darkness of creativity — you don’t realize how the darkness of creativity works and operates until you really take apart the concept of creativity,” he says. “You get to watch people do creative things, and then you see the thing they do is a kind of dark, twisted, perverted, twisted thing, and that really puts into context how and why we create the things we do, how we’re put in this world. In a way, it’s like having three great shows running concurrently. I get to walk out every night with a bunch of really cool people, and we’re going to do art together.”
With Smith in the role of a creative genius, what he is teaching now is, according to him, the “dark side of creativity.” And we know that one of the two “Dark” is “Darkest before the dawn.” We also know that, according to him, “Darkest before the dawn” is the life of Michael Maren, the man who will be the Dragonfly’s protagonist this week. Maren is the protagonist of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the 1989 cult classic about life, sexuality and, specifically, the darkness that surrounds those things. Smith got to work with Lynch on that