Acting on House of the Dragon is like “walking into a live Shakespeare play”

Filming on the first season of House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, is wrapping up. Set some 200 years before the original series, the show adapts George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, a history of the Targaryen dynasty. The main action will revolve around the Dance of the Dragons, a bloody civil war where different branches of the Targaryen family fought each other for the Iron Throne.

But the Targaryens aren’t the only players who matter. Like Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon has a huge cast. One key character is Ser Harwin “Breakbones” Strong, an able warrior who is heir to the castle of Harrenhal. He also happens to be (allegedly) the lover of Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and the actual father of her three sons, even though she’s married to Laenor Velaryon.

Ser Harwin is played by Australian actor Ryan Corr, who came to the House of the Dragon set after filming a smaller-scale drama series called The Secrets She Keeps. “In Australia, we’ll do 12-15 scenes a day and shoot about the equivalent in minutes, whereas over there, you can shoot one scene every two weeks,” he told If.com. “If you come in ready to go at the start of the day and are active through all the takes, by the time you get to your time at the end of the day, you can find yourself a little bit depleted. There is a bit of an adjustment when you go and do bigger scale things but essentially the job is the same – it’s all reliant on trust and who you are working with.”

"The sheer size of it was something I was amazed by. When you are walking into operational sets with actual jousting tournaments and full-level scale castles with fire cauldrons hanging on the roof, it’s a pretty incredible place to be. It’s like walking into a live Shakespeare play."

House of the Dragon showrunners separate their series from Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones fans are used to television on a grand scale and it’s no surprise that House of the Dragon will keep up that tradition. In fact, Game of Thrones was such a massive hit that it can weigh on the mind of everybody working on the prequel. Corry acknowledged that there are many fans to whom the story “meant so much” but is doing his best not to let that get in the way of delivering a good performance. “There’s a subconscious pressure that can creep up if you are not careful,” he said.

Happily, showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik emphasized to Corr and his castmates that this was a new story. “What Miguel and Ryan talked to us about on set and during the auditions is alleviating all that from your mind,” Corr remembered. “They said, ‘We don’t want people on here acting like they are going to be on Game of Thrones, it’s about bringing yourself to the forefront and humanizing these people.’”

That sounds pretty sensible to us. For what it’s worth, the strategy seems to be working, at least for George R.R. Martin, who loved the first couple episodes of House of the Dragon when he got to watch them a while back. “It’s dark, it’s powerful, it’s visceral… just the way I like my epic fantasy,” he raved.

House of the Dragon is due out later this year. Hopefully we’ll get news of a release date soon.

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