House of the Dragon stunt coordinator teases battle at sea in season 2

HBO is currently hard at work on the second season of House of the Dragon, which promises to be a good deal more intense than the first. Much of season 1 was spent skipping through time as we saw rivalries and grudges between characters build up over the years. Season 1 ended with a shocking moment of violence as Aemond Targaryen killed his nephew Lucerys Velaryon while the two of them were on their dragons. Lucerys’ mother Rhaenyra Targaryen is none too pleased about that. This means war.

Not that season 1 lacked for action scenes. Remember the joust from Episode 1 where Daemon Targaryen was dragged across the middle rail?

Good times. Stunt coordinator Rowley Irlam talked to The Hollywood Reporter about creating that moment: “With Daemon, the idea is that jousting is a bit like polo to him; it’s a rich man’s sport and he’s good at it, but he finds it boring,” he said. “What can we do to embarrass him but not hurt him, and that hasn’t been done before? That’s how we came up with the idea of laying him on the rail. It really pressed the right buttons for his character.”

What was the hardest action scene to shoot on House of the Dragon so far?

As for the most challenging stunt to film, it unsurprisingly involved the fight between the Targaryen and Velaryon kids in Episode 7, “Driftmark.” House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones before it had more elaborate action scenes, but when children are involved, everything is trickier.

“We had kids ranging from 9 to 13, and we couldn’t use doubles for them,” Irlam said. “The kids don’t know how to film a fight. How are we going to do this? We taught them how to throw a punch, how to change it if the camera angle was different, how to fall over. We built a set and filled it with rubber clippings about four inches deep so they couldn’t hurt themselves. We went into a blackened tunnel for three days and weren’t coming out until we’d finished. It was good fun, but hard work.”

All that said, we still haven’t had a full-scale battle on House of the Dragon of the kind we saw on Game of Thrones. It sounds like that will change in season 2.

The Battle of of the Gullet is coming in House of the Dragon season 2

“[T]he desire is always to go bigger and better — but to not repeat,” said Irlam, who also worked on Game of Thrones. “We don’t want ‘Battle of the Bastards 2’ or ‘Hardhome 2’ or ‘Spoils of War 2.’ We’re always trying to find new sequences we can get our teeth into.”

One thing Game of Thrones never did — at least not on the scale fans expected — was a battle at sea. The closest they came was probably the fight between the Greyjoys in “Stormborn” in season 7, but that was mostly confined to just one ship.

House of the Dragon is based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, and there’s a big sea battle coming up called the Battle of the Gullet. I won’t spoil the specifics, but it sounds like this battle has been on Irlam’s mind. “It’s not a secret that in this story there’s a battle at sea,” he said. “I think that’s where we’re headed.

"The desire is to expand our repertoire to a large sea battle. You can do a sea battle in a car park, but it won’t necessarily feel the same. But there are water tanks, and there’s a tank here in Leavesden. If you’re going to do it, I think you need to do it in a tank. But let’s see what happens."

If HBO is adapting the Battle of the Gullet — and it sounds like they are — it’ll likely happen towards the end of the second season. I’ll just give one tiny tease: dragons vs ships.

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