“House of the Dragon” showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal told a whooping audience at Shoreditch Town Hall in East London that Season 3 would deliver on the promise of the preceding season, and that the Battle of the Gullet sequence that kicks off the new season “is unlike anything that’s ever been done in television before.”
“All of the pot that was set to boil at the end of Season 2 very much picks up in Season 3, and you have these divided factions on either side, but there’s now divisions within the divisions, and those things will continue to fracture, and we’ll continue to see self-interested people do awful things in the name of pride and power and ego and self and family,” Condal told Empire’s Helen O’Hara, who moderated the session Friday at SXSW London.
Actor Steve Toussaint explained where his character, Lord Corlys Velaryon, also known as “The Sea Snake,” found himself at the start of Season 3, “When I first met Ryan, he said we’re going to start with a character who has everything, and we’re going to take it all away from him. Well, he’s on that journey. When we meet him at the beginning of Season 3, he’s still grieving his wife [Rhaenys Targaryen] and trying desperately to make links with his illegitimate son [Alyn of Hull], who doesn’t want anything to do with him, and so he’s having to deal with that, basically, and that’s a tough sell.”
Steve Toussaint plays Lord Corlys Velaryon
Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
Harry Collett, who plays Prince Jacaerys “Jace” Velaryon, said of his character’s relationship with his mother, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, who has been trying to assert her authority over him, “Yeah, he’s just being a grumpy teenager, really. He just thinks his mother’s wrong, and that she’s fallen into these traps right in front of his eyes, and he thinks he’s the best man in the room, but he is just a kid. But, yeah, he was born to be a leader, so he’s always going have that trait.”
Abubakar Salim, who plays Alyn, resisted the suggestion that we’ll see his character’s tough persona “softening” in Season 3, but he did say, “I think we see him mature. It’s really interesting because we left Season 2 with him very volatile and angry, and having a go at Corlys. So, I feel like we’re entering with that kind of vulnerability and rawness from the get-go. So, yeah, I think we see him mature through this season and kind of evolve with what’s going on.”
Admiral Sharako Lohar is played by Abigail Thorn
Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
Admiral Sharako Lohar, played by Abigail Thorn, had just been introduced in the final episode of Season 2, and was seen engaged in a mud-wrestling match with Tyland Lannister. The character is lightly sketched in the source material, George R. R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” but Thorn has developed her own back story for Sharako. “I have my own answers in my head of what exactly happened between her and Corlys to make her so dedicated to the task of bringing him down,” she said, “and, also, I was really inspired this season by ‘Moby-Dick.’ I read the novel, and I watched every adaptation that I could, because she’s Captain Ahab this season. She’s on this quest to bring down her white whale, and we’re going to see how far she goes to achieve that.”
Toussaint added, “Yes, I think we both have that thing, this inexorable draw to each other, that this has to be a final phase; it’s been going on for years and years, and then if they get to me, it’s going to be quite something.”
Season 3 will start with the Battle of the Gullet, one of the major military engagements of the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. It’s something that Condal and production designer Jim Clay have been building up to for some time. “Yes, this has been haunting Jim and I for the better part of four years now, and Kevin de la Noy, our physical producer, who had to logistically schedule and pay for this whole thing. But yeah, this sequence I will confidently say is unlike anything that’s ever been done in television before,” Condal said. “Certainly, the amount of construction that you guys [referring to Clay and his team] did for just for one episode is kind of crazy and frankly irresponsible. But it was necessary to tell the story. I mean, this is such a seminal moment in the show.”
“I’m a huge ‘Lord of the Rings’ fan, and I always said it’s like if you’re making ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and we’re like, ‘Well, maybe we could just say, “Well, you know man, Helm’s Deep, that was a crazy battle, you should have been there, you should have seen it.”’ No, you have to show the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and I felt like, with this telling, however we got there, and however we did it, we had to dramatize this moment, that even within the bloody, awful history of the Dance of the Dragons, the Gullet stands out, even to those historians [of Westeros], as one of the worst things that happened in that history. We had to dramatize it, we had to show it, so it took a lot of blueprints, and …”
With that, Clay continued the sentence, “… a huge number of pieces of an enormous jigsaw, which eventually came together through all the different departments, and these amazing guys putting it together narratively, but, paying credit to producer Kevin de la Noy, who constantly said, ‘You’ve been utterly profligate,’ all the way through the design process, he actually designed the tanks, the dry tank and the wet tank, so he played his part as well.”
Clay, who said that “Master and Commander” was an inspiration for the Battle of the Gullet, had his team build a full-scale version of Corlys’s ship, “The Queen That Never Was,” and put it in a dry tank on a gimbal, and then they moved part of it to a wet tank on another gimbal. “We’d throw water at all these guys all the time, and the ship’s going up and down, and in both directions, and then we did it all again with [Sharako’s ship] ‘The Bitchfist,’” Clay said. “It was a dangerous environment. The floor was slippery, with blood everywhere.”
Toussaint said of the preparations for the battle sequence, which was directed by Loni Peristere, “Initially, Loni called us all, way before we began shooting anything, to talk us through all of the models and the pictures, and also to discuss the emotional journey that each of us go through in this battle. Then there was the stunt choreography, which was … I don’t know how many weeks that was, but an awful lot of it, going over it over and over again. And then, when you get onto the wonderful set, which is a lot smaller than the gym that we were training in, with water all over the deck, the deck’s moving up and down, and they had a few corpses there for us to jump over, and, of course, when we were doing the training fights we were all in track suits. I had all these wonderful sexy moves, and then, once I put the armor on, I couldn’t do any of them.”
Thorn added, “As soon as I got the contract for Season 3, I hit the gym. I put on like 10-15 kilos [22-33 pounds] of muscle between seasons, so I guess the ‘Bitchfist’ must have a chest press on it in the hold, and then it was sword fighting and boxing training with the stunt team, and the stunt team have all doubled for superheroes in the past, so the people who trained us to fight were Captain America, Thor, Deadpool and Wonder Woman.”
Salim said of the armor, “It was a lot, like it was definitely something. I mean, you’ve got three people to help you put these things on, so that can kind of give you an idea of how cumbersome they are, and the helmet was ridiculous, because every now and then you’d swing at something and the helmet would go over your eyes, and then suddenly you’re swinging and you look like you don’t know what you’re doing, but I think it helped sell the madness and the kind of chaos that was on the actual deck itself. I think it really helped sell the fear and the kind of instinct and primal energy that comes when you’re in a fight, because that was something that was really a big lesson for me.”
“I remember the first day when we were filming with the stunt team, and it was the first clash, and when Loni, the director, yelled action, and we all kind of clashed together – keep in mind, we’ve been rehearsing for months and trying to get ready in our minds for this – the energy was almost like a mosh pit, and it was frightening, because everyone became … it wasn’t about picking sides, it was about surviving, and you could feel that. I remember swiping at someone on my own side, and it was crazy but that’s what was really kind of cool and magical about it.”
Speaking about Season 3 overall, Condal said, “The season does have a feeling of relentlessness to it. The events set in motion at the end of Season 2 do flip the boulder that starts to roll down the hill, and there is the sense of inexorability. I think at points in the story up to here it felt like, ‘Oh, maybe we can claw this all back from the abyss, and maybe there is a chance.’ The reasonable, responsible adults in the story see that Armageddon is a possibility for one of the endpoints of this, but I think in this season it just feels like it starts moving at speed and never stops.”
“This is the biggest season we have made by a huge margin. I mean, just the number of shoot days, number of locations that we’re on, the amount of construction that Jim and his team did.”
Speaking about the question of leadership in the series and the flawed nature of those that seek to lead, Condal said, “One of the big themes in this season is, ‘What does the throne make you? What does the throne do to you when you are in proximity of it? And it’s something that’s always interested me about this world.”