If you know anything about the process of shooting an effects-heavy, big-budget movie like 2025’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake, you’d probably think the hardest part of the job would be the performance: trying to have convincing emotional relationships with characters that’ll be added digitally later. Or maybe it’d be all the stunts, which for HTTYD stars Mason Thames (who plays awkward teen Viking Hiccup) and Nico Parker (as skillful teen Viking Astrid), involved a lot of dangling from wire rigs and riding high-tech versions of mechanical bulls, meant to simulate their characters’ dragon companions.
But, no, Thames told Polygon in an interview, the hardest part was spending the entire movie pretending to be left-handed.
Most viewers would probably respond to that with a He did what now? That includes Parker. When Thames brought up the fact that he played Hiccup as left-handed in the movie, his co-star said, “Wait, you did? I didn’t even notice.”
“It was very difficult!” Thames said. “I’m actually right-handed, but Hiccup in the original movie is left-handed. So me and [director Dean DeBlois, who also co-directed the original animated movie and its sequels] wanted to keep it the same, [along with] a lot of little things from the 2010 animated movie, to make an audience feel comfortable.”
Image: Universal Studios
Fans of the animated movie may not have even noticed Hiccup was left-handed, at least not consciously. (In the movie’s touchstone scene, where he first touches Toothless, the dragon he befriends, he uses his right hand. Possibly because he feels that’s the one he can stand to lose if Toothless bites it clean off.) But being left-handed would mean he uses weapons and tools differently from everyone else in the movie — a significant thing for a Viking kid who already feels out of step with his war-focused community. And in an animated movie in particular, making the character left-handed would have been a conscious design choice DeBlois would have needed to consider in every shot.
Thames says he and DeBlois still felt it was important to keep the live-action version of the character as much like the animated version as possible, to preserve the original movie’s alchemy. “There are so many things about Hiccup to make him so iconic and lovable, and it just makes you feel so warm,” he said. “So a lot of the little things, we kept the same to keep Hiccup, Hiccup.”
Parker laughed at his answer. “Yours is way smarter than mine,” she said. “I was just going to say the boots were fiery and heavy, and it was just difficult doing stunts in them. They are kind of modeled just after the animated Astrid’s look, and I think it makes a really nice silhouette, but ultimately, having to do stunts in them was just weight on your feet.”
Image: Universal Studios
In terms of the movie’s most difficult stunts, Parker says none of the wire work, tumbling, or weapons work in the dragon-fighting arena was as difficult as the one time she had to hop across a stream.
“Two-second moment in the film, but there is one bit where Astrid’s following Hiccup through the woods, and I’m jumping over rocks,” she said. “But honestly, the rocks were so slippery. I was attached to a wire so I wouldn’t fall into the water. And it looks so short, but actually doing it […] Even my stunt double was finding it difficult. So actually watching that, for me, is a tiny moment that I’m very proud of.”
“For me, I’ve talked about it a lot, but I really just fall a lot in this movie,” Thames said. “I had a month of practice. Everybody else was learning how to flip swords and stuff, and I’m just, ‘All right, Mason, fall again.’ It was just a lot of falling.
“Nothing was too difficult — it was more fun. Just the dropping. There’s me on wires and then [DeBlois] would drop me and I’d just spin, for whatever test drive was about to go down.”
The 2025 live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon is now available for digital purchase and viewing, and it’s coming to DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K on Aug. 12.
