‘Tom Jones’ Star Solly McLeod Almost Lost His ‘Masterpiece’ Role Because of ‘House of the Dragon’

Masterpiece on PBS is going to introduce audiences to a whole new take on Henry Fielding’s saucy magnum opus when Tom Jones premieres at 9 PM ET. The show is the brainchild of screenwriter and director Gwyneth Hughes, who recently adapted another classic, Vanity Fair, for Prime Video. Hughes was dead set on finding the perfect Tom Jones and the perfect Sophia Western for the project, but she almost lost out on series star Solly McLeod.

“What’s funny about finding Solly is that we saw more than hundred boys,” Tom Jones writer and showrunner Gwyneth Hughes told Decider. “I mean, they were all lovely. I’m not going to diss them, but they all looked like they’d been up all night writing poetry.”

“And I kept saying, ‘This is not Tom. He’s a child of nature and he needs to be outdoorsy. Could you just look for someone who looks like the captain of the village cricket team?'”

“And then up goes Solly. He looks like the captain of the village cricket team and he’s just adorable,” she said. “I mean, the minute I saw him: ‘That’s Tom. That’s my Tom. That’s the boy I mean.’”

Solly McLeod was the perfect Tom Jones, but he was also quite busy working on a little HBO show called House of the Dragon. McLeod played Ser Joffrey Lonmouth, aka the Knight of Kisses in the first season of the Game of Thrones prequel. He was Laenor Velaryon’s (Theo Nate) boyfriend and died a brutal death at Rhaenyra’s (Milly Alcock) wedding to Laenor. McLeod’s character was beaten to death by Ser Criston Cole (Fabian Frankel) in front of the whole court.

McLeod revealed to Decider that filming Ser Joffrey’s death scene was “intense” for him because he was already in a lot of pain.

“I had a cold when we were filming that scene and I was kind of bunged up — but it wasn’t COVID because we were tested — but I did have a cold and it hurt to move my head too quickly,” McLeod told Decider. “So I was there being punched, having to move my head. I didn’t have to act very much to be uncomfortable.”

“Me and Fabian had a nice kind of relationship when we were on set. After every time I got up from being punched to death, we have a big hug in front of everyone. Like, ‘it’s all good.’ You just have to do that thing otherwise it starts getting, it’s like, ‘Do you really hate me?'” McLeod said with a chuckle.

The good news is that no one really hated McLeod. Not Fabian Frankel and certainly not the producers of Masterpiece’s Tom Jones. The problem was that the executive producers had their hearts set on Solly McLeod as Tom and Sophie Wilde as his true love, Sophia, and neither McLeod nor Wilde’s schedules worked with the production calendar.

“Solly did a very late night audition, and we were like, ‘It’s definitely him,’ but he was busy filming House of the Dragon at the time. So he wasn’t [available],” Tom Jones EP James Gandhi told Decider. “So if we wanted Sophie, we couldn’t have Solly. If we wanted Solly, we couldn’t have Sophie. So we moved heaven and earth and pushed the schedule back by a month to make [it work].”

“It meant that Solly had maybe half a day off before he came and stepped into this completely different character. And we eventually made it work and lots of people were very angry because it was very, very difficult to move the schedule and we were told we couldn’t do it, but there’s no point doing this show unless you have the perfect Tom and Sophia. And genuinely, I know everyone says this, but there really wasn’t anyone else. It had to be them.”

Decider asked McLeod what it was like shifting from the cunning and flirtatious knight of Westeros to the open-hearted hero of Tom Jones so quickly. He said that meeting up with co-star Sophia Wilde straight off the plane in Belfast for a “couple of pints” at a pub helped give him confidence that it would work — “We’re gonna be good and we just built from there” — but it was still a stressful process.

“It’s something that I think I’ve probably removed from my brain just because of the stress,” McLeod said. “But it was something I knew I had to do. So I kind of just, I didn’t think about it too much and I just did it, you know? Those things that it’s like adrenaline takes over or something. Let’s just do it.”

You can check out Solly McLeod as Tom Jones when the series premieres tonight on Masterpiece at 9/8 C.