Game of Thrones spin-off returns to King’s Landing filming location
By Dan Selcke
House of the Dragon, the first of (potentially) several Game of Thrones prequel series is off and running, with cast and crew members filming the first season as we speak. We’ve already seen them shooting on Holywell Beach in Cornwall, England, but like its mother show, House of the Dragon will film in a lot of locations.
And some of them will be familiar. According to Los Siete Reinos (via Spanish newspaper Hoy), the show will film in the city of Cáceres and at the fortress of Trujillo, both in Spain. As Watchers on the Wall lays out, Cáceres stood in for King’s Landing in the scene where Euron paraded Yara and the Sand Snakes through the streets in season 7. It also stood in for Oldtown when Gilly and Sam left the city. As for Trujillo, it served as King’s Landing in the season 7 finale when Jaime and Bronn look out over the walls at the gathered Unsullied.
Does that guarantee that mean that Cáceres and Trujillo will once again stand in for King’s Landing and Oldtown? We don’t know, although it’s a good bet. House of the Dragon is set some 170 years before the events of Game of Thrones, and a lot of the locations we got to know on that show are still around. HBO spent years looking for good locations for Game of Thrones, so why not use what it already learned?
House of the Dragon gets an expanded new home base
Of course, there will be new locations, as well. House of the Dragon will also be filming in Portugal, which Game of Thrones never did. And it’ll do a lot of shooting on sound stages, with its main base being at Warner Bros. Studios at Leavesden (WBSL) in the U.K. Variety reports that WBSL has recently build three new sound stages as well as a virtual stage of the kind used on The Mandalorian — basically a wraparound room where every wall is covered in LED panels that allows shows to realistically simulate outdoor environments — and that House of the Dragon will be the first show to take advantage of the expanded facilities.
“A production with the ambition and scale of ‘House of the Dragon’ really requires a studio that can provide cutting-edge facilities,” said HBO exec Janet Graham Borba. “The new virtual stage adds to the highly supportive home hub for the show at Leavesden and lets us take full advantage of the latest developments in technology.”
We’ll find out more about the locations when the first season of House of the Dragon debuts on HBO sometime in 2022.
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