HBO is currently filming the second season of House of the Dragon, its Game of Thrones prequel series. While we wait patiently here at home, showrunner Ryan Condal talked to IndieWire about the origins of the show, its first season, and where it’s headed.
Condal was friends with A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin for years before HBO started casting around for a follow-up to Game of Thrones. At first, Condal pitched the network on a series based on Martin’s novellas about Dunk and Egg, a knight and squire who wandered Westeros about a century before the events of Game of Thrones. The lighter tone of those novellas, he figured, would be a nice palette cleanser after the intensity of the original series. “It was just like The Mandalorian to the big Star Wars saga films,” Condal said. “This was a completely different flavor.”
But that wasn’t what HBO wanted…at the time, anyway; they’ve since greenlit a Dunk and Egg show. “HBO wanted something big and muscular in the fight for the throne. They wanted something more like House of the Dragon,” Condal said.
House of the Dragon begins
That’s what Martin wanted too, and eventually, after a few more stops and starts, that’s what HBO went with. Then the task became deciding how to adapt Martin’s “fake history book” Fire & Blood — which tells the story of the Dance of the Dragons, a brutal Targaryen civil war — into a coherent TV show. Condal and his team, which included Martin, decided to start things off with a young Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, best friends who would grow over time into bitter enemies.
“It definitely felt like that was the right place to begin the series and then take our time over 10 episodes and set up all of these characters as the chess pieces on the board,” Condal said. “The expectation going into the show is that it is going to deliver big escapist fantasy. George’s books take you along in this engrossing romantic tale, but it turns all of the Arthurian or Lord of the Rings tropes on their head. The general rule is if we’re going to throw these people into the war and start killing them, we better care about them before.”
Another cornerstone of the first season is the relationship between Viserys and Daemon Targaryen, the king and the younger brother who thinks he could do a better job in the job. “It’s a tragic romance between two people who really love each other and then cannot help but hurt each other,” Condal said. “Daemon is heroic at moments. He is the basest of villains and he loves his family. He also tries to destroy them at times. He’s a devoted husband, except when he’s not.”
On the “tricky balance” of adapting George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood for TV
Condal and his team also had to deal with the fact that Fire & Blood doesn’t have access to the whole story; it’s written from the perspective of a historian writing many years after the fact, so he doesn’t know all the details. Those would have to be invented.
“The tricky balance in crafting the adaptation is satisfying George and satisfying the text of Fire and Blood,” Condal said. “And that’s hopefully satisfying the fans, but also delivering something that is going to work for this massive worldwide audience that’s probably not going to read, as George calls it, ‘a fake history book.’ It’s this constant tightrope walk.”
So far, that tightrope walk has looked very impressive. It helps that the story is so elementally powerful: families against families, friends against friends, dragons against dragons…the material for a rip-roaring good time is there. “If it’s layered and deep and complex, people will draw things out of it,” Condal said. “The approach we’ve always taken with this show is to provide as much as possible without getting lost in its explication and exposition.”
When Ryan Condal knew House of the Dragon was a hit
That brought Condal and co up to premiere day, which set ratings records for HBO. “I knew the actors were fantastic,” Condal said. “I knew the drama was working. And it looked gorgeous. It felt to me that it was what the audience was expecting and hoping for: a high-quality, complex, well-acted successor to Game of Thrones. I wasn’t buying an island in French Polynesia, but I was confident that we had something pretty good.”
"But we also didn’t know. It was three years past the end of the original series. You’re following the Beatles. It’s a brand-new cast. It’s not this thing about good versus evil and the coming of the long winter, and White Walkers and shapeshifters and direwolves. We had the dragons."
Obviously, it worked out. Now on to season 2…
House of the Dragon season 2 is “about the kids”
“This second season is about the kids that we only saw for a couple of episodes at the end of the series that are now grown up to be young adults who have dragons, who are of riding and fighting age, who have opinions of their own and a desire to get out there and defend the family claim,” Condal said, referring to characters like Jacaerys Velaryon, Aemond Targaryen and Baela and Rhaena Targaryen.
And how long will these characters be fighting for our amusement? Condal said that there are “more than two” seasons left. “That’s part of the discussion that we’re having. Where do you appropriately end the series in a way that doesn’t doesn’t feel clipped, but also doesn’t feel dragged out?”
House of the Dragon season 2 will (hopefully) premiere on HBO and Max sometime in 2024.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels