House of the Dragon introduces many new Games of Thrones characters, and one of them is villain Craghas Drahar. Otherwise known as Crabtree, he’s a Myrish prince that doesn’t have a lot of lore behind him, giving his actor lots of open ground in the fantasy series.
“It’s nice when you have details, as well, but it’s also nice when it’s a completely open book,” Daniel Scott-Smith, the actor behind Crabfeeder, told Entertainment Weekly. “That gave us the freedom to do what we wanted with the character, which, on a creative level, was incredible for me and I think for the directors, as well, because we could play with it and build our own version of Crabfeeder.”
Might go without saying, but Crabfeeder was not a good person. He led an alliance of three kingdoms, Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh, to commandeering trade route Stepstones. Overseeing somewhere vital to Westeros’s imports and exports brought out his dictatorial side, with passers-by expected to pay a high levy that forced crews to get into shadier and shadier businesses.
“Craghas Drahar is seen as the bad guy, but for any bad character there’s always got to be a journey of how they got to that point,” Scott-Smith says. “We wanted to remember that there’s two sides to him. So we spoke about the idea of him being a prince, or that he calls himself a prince, so he came from some sort of higher house. We spoke about that and the gradual decline to where he is, how the greyscale might affect him physically, even mentally.”
As mentioned, Crabfeeder has Greyscale on his arm in the drama series, the same affliction that took out Jorah Mormont. His nickname comes from feeding pirates to crabs as punishment for defying him. He also wears a mask that’s tied to some deeper lore, as Sons of the Harpy in Meereen wore the same kind in Game of Thrones.
“We spoke about the idea of him being the first person to wear this mask and it becoming iconic,” he says. “Therefore, it’s built from that [for Game of Thrones]… Why is he wearing the mask? How does he feel about that? It’s a power statement, so he’s quite happy wearing it.”
We’ll have to wait and see where he goes next in the TV series. House of Dragon airs weekly on Sundays on HBO.