I did mention the heavy days of writing and needing to lie low for a bit?
Here's a great share and a reminder to finish watching season two!
Showrunner Ryan Condal sits down (over Zoom) with EW as production kicks off in the U.K.
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- Showrunner Ryan Condal addresses that now-deleted George R. R. Martin blog post criticizing House of the Dragon.
- Teasing the big Battle of the Gullet, Condal feels it could be "the most complex sequence" ever done for TV.
- Sons of Anarchy star Tommy Flanagan joins as a fan-favorite book character. Condal previews what's to come.
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Theo Whiteman/HBO
Ryan Condal appreciates your patience. The showrunner behind House of the Dragon knows that much of his audience is foaming at the mouth to see all-out warfare — Targaryen vs. Targaryen, dragon vs. dragon, a nuclear-level battle for the Iron Throne. They could smell the blood from season 2's dogfight over Rook’s Rest, and after watching the pieces slowly fall into place, they are hungry for more.
There are practical reasons for that wait. Part of it is the adaptation process. House of the Dragon chronicles the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragon, an event that didn’t just happen overnight. George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, a fictionalized history of the famed silver-haired House, tracks the events that toppled the once flourishing empire over the course of years. And even as the show plays with time differently, a lot of bricks needed to be laid in order to get to this point. (Yes, we're including Daemon's haunted glamping trip to Harrenhal.)
Another part of it is budgets. "There's been no television show in history that ever said, 'We have too much money and too much time to make this,'" Condal tells Entertainment Weekly in an exclusive interview. "You're always making decisions as you go along as to, how are we going to use the resources we have right now to tell the best story we can possibly tell? But I appreciate everybody's patience." Now, as House of the Dragon season 3 officially fires up filming a new batch of eight episodes in the U.K., Condal sits down with EW over Zoom to preview what’s to come — and he's giving the people what they want.
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Ollie Upton/HBO
"This is certainly our biggest season to date, both in terms of ambition and just the practical size, the amount of sets," he says. "We're cresting that narrative parabola here and starting to come down into, if not the endgame, the midpoint and getting into the late Act 2 and moving onto the start of Act 3. Anybody that's read that book knows that the narrative gets bigger and grimmer as it goes along, and the show has to match that ambition as best it possibly can."
As for the Dance itself, “I will say that the war this season goes very hot, very, very quickly,” he teases. “I think the people that were waiting and waiting for all of the horrible, brutal, pitiless bloodshed will be getting it in copious amounts.”
The George R. R. Martin of it all
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Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Despite the ambitious planning, a storm cloud still lurks. In a blog post published in late August to his "Not a Blog" LiveJournal, Martin, the creator of Game of Thrones, signaled to his audience that he needed to address "everything that's gone wrong with House of the Dragon." He then published a follow-up days later in September criticizing the adaptation, particularly the choices to omit certain characters and approach key scenes differently. Martin — who praised the other Thrones prequel adaptation, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — pulled the post within hours, but his words, like everything on the internet, spread like wildfire (the Westerosi kind).
Condal addresses the post for the first time, telling EW he didn't see it himself but was told about it. "It was disappointing," he admits. "I will simply say I've been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy. George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer."
Condal acknowledges he's said most of this in previous interviews, including how Fire & Blood isn't a traditional narrative. "It's this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way," he continues. "I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time. But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time. At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that's my job. So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that's what I have to say about it."
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Martin's biggest gripe in his deleted blog entry revolved around the omission of Maelor Targaryen, the third child of Queen Helaena (Phia Saban). That character's absence impacted the context of the tragic Blood and Cheese sequence early in season 2 — Condal previously addressed why the writers approached that scene differently — and Martin feared for other potential ripple effects as it pertains to Helaena's future. Condal promises he has a plan in place.
"There's nothing we do on the show without talking it through and thinking about it very deeply for usually many months, if not years," he says. "I will just say that the creative decisions that we make in the show all flow through me, every single one of them, and this is the show that I want to make and believe, as a fan of Fire & Blood and a deep reader of this material, it is the adaptation that we should be making to not only serve Fire & Blood, but also a massive television audience."
The Battle of the Gullet
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Ollie Upton/HBO
Speaking of the show's massive audience, there's at least one event season 3 will adapt early on that Condal is confident will please those thirsting for spectacle: the Battle of the Gullet. The season 2 finale signaled this naval onslaught, considered in the book to be one of the bloodiest sea skirmishes in history. The Triarchy forces, now in league with the Greens, set sail to break the Velaryon blockade of the Gullet, the crucial water passage held by Rhaenyra's (Emma D'Arcy) forces since the start of the war.
The bloody assault that ensues will mark the first true display of the Sea Snake (Steve Toussaint) and the Velaryon fleet in action on screen. And people will die.
"In many ways, the Gullet has been on the minds of the production for about three years now and trying to figure out how we were going to mount it in a way that was both producible and exciting, thrilling," Condal, who wrote this particular episode, prefaces. "The planning that has gone into this... basically all departments working in concert to really make a thing that nobody has ever done before."
He also notes that Kevin de la Noy, who worked as a production manager on Titanic, is an executive producer on House of the Dragon, saying, "He comes in having worked on one of the biggest naval sequences ever put to film. But, yeah, it's a stunning thing. I would like to think that this is probably the most complex sequence that's ever been done for television, not necessarily the most expensive or the longest shoot or anything like that, but just based on the number of moving pieces, the amount of different disciplines, media that have to be blended together to achieve success because you're talking about sea and ships and dragons and action."
Condal promises "four major events that we cover from the book in season 3," the Battle of the Gullet included. He will leave fans to debate what the rest are exactly for the next year or so.
New casting
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Courtesy of Simon Murphy; HBO; Courtesy HBO
There are a few new faces joining the fray in season 3. One of them, EW can exclusively reveal, is Tommy Flanagan. The Sons of Anarchy and Gladiator star joins as Ser Roderick Dustin, someone fans will recognize by his nickname, Roddy the Ruin. The head of House Dustin and leader of a 2,000-man army of savage northerners called the Winter Wolves, Ser Roderick is described in Fire & Blood as "so old and hoary men called him Roddy the Ruin." (More on his casting here.)
After conducting the interview with Condal, EW also confirmed Dan Fogler of Fantastic Beasts and A Complete Unknown as Ser Torrhen Manderly, a knight from House Manderly and another northman. He's described in Fire & Blood as clever, well-spoken, and corpulent.
The third new face of season 3 was already made public: James Norton (Little Women) will debut as Ormund Hightower, who's the nephew of Otto (Rhys Ifans); cousin to Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Gwayne (Freddie Fox); and Lord of Oldtown, the ancestral seat of House Hightower. At present, he's leading the Hightower armies from Oldtown to march against Rhaenyra and the Blacks, as glimpsed in the season 2 finale.
"This is the biggest new role that I think we've added since season 1," Condal says. "I think that Ormund is really going to delight and surprise the audience with what he brings to the narrative and with what James does with the character."
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Karwai Tang/WireImage
Condal points out that Ormund is the son of Lord Hobert Hightower, the previous head of House Hightower, played by Steffan Rhodri for three episodes in the earlier timeline of season 1. "We saw he had a very particular brand of older brother-ness with Otto," Condal remarks of Hobert. "Hobert has since passed away, and Ormund has inherited the High Tower. So Ormund is the voice of the south."
Among Ormund's troops is another member of the Greens who's been long absent from the narrative: Daeron Targaryen, Alicent's son who's only been referenced on the show so far as he's been squiring for Ormund at Oldtown. Condal says he can't announce that casting just yet but reiterates, "Daeron's in the story. He's a big feature in the book, but if you read the book narrative sequentially, the material we've covered so far didn't really have a lot of call for Daeron in it, which is why we're getting to this now. I won't say much more, but I will say that the fact that Daeron has not featured in the world of his family, at least his immediate nuclear family, is sort of the point I think. The thing that interested us, if not the most, about his character is who he is now as a young man."
And in case casual viewers and book fans alike have questions about the fate of King Aegon after he fled King's Landing in secret with Larys Strong (Matthew Needham), Condal confirms actor Tom Glynn-Carney is still "a big, big part of the show." Aegon, too, is a character who disappears from the narrative in Fire & Blood. "He's kind of lost to history in the sense that nobody really knows what happened," he explains. "We took that, as the writers, as a great opportunity to figure out. That was one of the great challenges of writing season 2: figuring out something that would work and be satisfying, but also not cause ripple effects in the narrative and change where the other big pieces are going. Honestly, I think it's one of the best stories that we cracked this year."
The endgame
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Courtesy of HBO
At the time Condal speaks with EW earlier in March, his team has yet to film a single frame of season 3, but the showrunner feels a sense of awe watching the parts fall into place behind the scenes. House of the Dragon veterans Clare Kilner, Andrij Parekh, and Loni Peristere, as well as Nina Lopez-Corrado (The Night Agent) will direct the eight episodes. Like the fandom that follows him, Condal, too, is ready to see it all happen.
Though HBO has yet to make a formal announcement, it looks like season 4 will be the final season of House of the Dragon. As Condal approaches the ultimate endgame, he's thinking about the connective tissues between this drama and the flagship Game of Thrones series. "There has to be a why, why we're telling the story of House of the Dragon," he says. "I can get into the why of that at the very end after the series finale has aired, but we set out at the very beginning with a very specific point of view on that."
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- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
