Of all the actors who worked on Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage is one of the most recognizable. Who didn’t love Tyrion Lannister, the fast-talking Hand of the Queen who drank and knew things? Emmy voters certainly did, as he was the sole actor from the show to ever bring home the statue; four of them, to be exact.
Dinklage recently appeared on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast to promote his new movie Cyrano. Naturally, Game of Thrones came up, and Dinklage gave his take on HBO’s upcoming prequel series House of the Dragon.
“I think it is going to be a really good show,” Dinklage said. “The director and producer of it worked on our show, and I think it’s going to be really fucking good.”
The director Dinklage is referring to is Miguel Sapochnik, who helmed Game of Thrones episodes like “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” “The Winds of Winter,” “The Long Night” and “The Bells.” Sapochnik is serving as co-showrunner alongside Ryan Condal. So we’re inclined to agree with him that House of the Dragon is in really good hands.
Dinklage thinks House of the Dragon is a “safe bet” for HBO
However, House of the Dragon is a very different sort of beast than Game of Thrones. This is a spinoff to one of the most successful shows in history, whereas Thrones was something that had never been tried before.
“They took a risk on our show, HBO did,” Dinklage continued. “They took a huge risk on our show. It was a slow start, but why don’t they do that again? This isn’t a risk. It’s a proven thing that works.”
That’s fair. Though Game of Thrones went on to win 59 Emmys and become a media phenomenon, at the time that HBO first picked up the show it was seen as an enormous gamble.
“As much as the idea of doing a best-selling fantasy show seems obvious now, at the time, big world-building genres were not popular in the marketplace,” HBO executive Gina Balian told journalist James Andrew Miller in his 2021 book Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers. James Hibberd echoed similar sentiments in his Game of Thrones behind-the-scenes book Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, where he explained how, before Thrones, this was simply not the kind of show that networks attempted on account of its big budget, complexity, and the high chance of it flopping.
Of course, the situation now is very different. Every other network is trying to capitalize on the fantasy trend, from Netflix with The Witcher to Amazon with The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time. It is a pretty sure bet that audiences are going to at least give a Game of Thrones spinoff on HBO a chance, though ultimately the show will have to sink or swim on its own merits. And this is only the first of many planned Game of Thrones spinoffs in various stages of development at the network.
We’ll find out just how safe a bet House of the Dragon is when it premieres on HBO and HBO Max later this year.
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