The second season of House of the Dragon is now in production, although the writers and producers aren’t giving direct interviews because of the ongoing Hollywood writers strike. But Deadline wanted to put out some news anyway, so it’s compiled interviews it did with the cast and crew months prior, including from a panel screening and discussion in March attended by House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal and George R.R. Martin, who wrote both A Song of Ice and Fire (the source material for Game of Thrones) and Fire & Blood, the source material for the prequel series.
“[Fire & Blood is] significantly different from the books that were the source for Game of Thrones,” Martin said. “Those are five, soon to be seven, I hope, novels that are fully developed with characters, the dialogue, the scenes, it’s all there. Fire and Blood is an imaginary history book that has a few scenes where I zero in and I give you a path page of a scene. I give you some actual dialogue, but mostly it’s history. It’s an outline and you can’t present an outline in television, so it has to be filled in. And that’s where I think Ryan and his staff of writers … have done a marvelous job.”
"In Fire and Blood, for example, it is stated that Aemma Arryn dies in childbirth and her son dies the following day. There’s nothing about the most horrendous childbirth scene ever seen on television. [Looking at Condal] That was entirely the work of you and your writers. And it’s incredibly powerful scene that just my summary, one line would not have conveyed. There’s a lot of that in this show. It’s an adaptation, but it’s also a creation."
Shaping Viserys and Daemon for House of the Dragon
Fire & Blood is indeed a tricky text to adapt, but it also provided Condal and his team with lots of unique opportunities. Characters like King Viserys Targaryen, his daughter Rhaenyra, his brother Daemon, and his new wife Alicent Hightower are sketched out, and then the writers get to fill in the particulars.
“The trick was really to show this generational conflict that began with Viserys’s generation,” Condal said. “Viserys and his hand Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) passed it down to their children, Rhaenyra and Alicent, who were young women and used as pawns in the game of thrones. And then as they grew up and became adults and had children of their own, and this bitter rivalry and grasp for power gets passed on to their children. So it’s a three-generational story and we needed to get through that in the course of one season.”
King Viserys in particular was expanded upon; the results were so good that Martin personally told actor Paddy Considine that the new version of Viserys was better than the one he came up with for his book. “We started with the desire to portray this very complicated character who we always said was a really good man but was not a good king,” Condal said. “The reason for that is because he’s actually quite a modern politician. He’s not quick to move. He takes consensus. He finds the middle often. Those aren’t qualities that work in a feudal medieval society. They are things we look for in our contemporary leaders. We were really excited to populate this world with a character like that. There’s a certain weakness seen in that.”
Daemon, on the other hand, is pretty close to the man we see in Fire & Blood, which is to say he’s a knot of contradictions: good, bad, noble, degenerate, and everything in between. Actor Matt Smith relished the challenge. “I think Daemon’s got his own sense of morality, so to him, he feels like he’s always doing the right thing,” Smith said. “I think his love for his brother is true. It’s just slightly ill-conceived at times. And when you think he’s doing the right thing, actually, he’s not. And when he thinks he’s doing the wrong thing, he’s not. I don’t know whether there’s a good guy waiting to come out in Daemon, but I certainly think there’s a side of him that is loyal.”
Older Rhaenyra and Alicent actors didn’t confer with their younger counterparts on House of the Dragon
The first season of House of the Dragon was unique in that it took place over a period of decades, which in the case of Rhaenyra and Alicent meant changing actors halfway through: Milly Alcock and Emily Carey played the younger versions of the characters while Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke took over for the older versions.
“It’s rarely done,” Cooke told Deadline. “I think while watching it, I felt more pressure than when I actually filmed it. It never felt like we were replacing the others. It just felt like the first five episodes were a sort of a time capsule.”
According to D’Arcy, the older actors didn’t talk much with the younger ones about the characters before taking over the roles. “I also didn’t feel like that was necessary,” D’Arcy said. “I think something that’s so nice about how the first series is constructed is that it does give sort of a tangible distance from one’s childhood. I definitely feel my childhood self to be quite separate from me and I can sort of see the edges of the person that I was as a child in a way that I’m not as good at seeing my edges now. I loved how that was literalized in the show. It was also just a huge honor because Millie is such a brilliant actor, and it was very lovely to come in after they’ve taken care so beautifully in the first five episodes. It was a very generous springboard for me and Olivia, I think.”
It was important for House of the Dragon to keep “the ick factor”
Pretty early on, the show establishes some sexual tension between Rhaenyra and Daemon, who I remind you at this juncture are niece and uncle. That is, obviously, gross, but it’s part of the story, so the cast and crew decided to lean into it.
“If we’re going to show this relationship and we’re going to do the whole thing justice, the ick factor has to be present because that’s honest,” D’Arcy said. “It can be sexy, and you’ve got to keep the ick in the room because that’s honest.”
Eventually, the two even get married and have kids, which wasn’t out of the ordinary for Targaryens at this time in Martin’s invented history. “Obviously we’re dealing with events that are hundreds of years old and the morality was different then,” Smith said. “But ultimately, it’s important to the story. So, therefore, Daemon and Rhaenyra do their thing.”
George R.R. Martin didn’t like that the dragons on Game of Thrones were “all the same”
Another big selling point for House of the Dragon: the dragons. Where Game of Thrones only had three, House of the Dragon practically has a dragon for every character with silver-blonde hair, and there are a lot of them, with many more to come in season 2.
What’s more, all of the dragons looked and acted distinct this time around, whereas on Game of Thrones Daenerys Targaryen’s three babies all sort of seemed the same. And that’s not just me saying that; George R.R. Martin himself has said as much.
“They were like all the same,” Martin said of Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion. The dragons on House of the Dragon — including Syrax, Caraxes and Meleys — step things up. “They had personality. They came alive. It came as great satisfaction to me.”
House of the Dragon season 2 will “fall into the more traditional rhythms of storytelling”
That brings us to House of the Dragon season 2, which comes out sometime in the summer of 2024. “I’m excited to pick up where we left off,” Condal said. “We did the hard, complex work of setting up this entirely new dynasty and family and all the players in Season 1 and took the time to do all the character work so you understood where everybody fell along the line of are they on Alicent’s side of the equation, Aegon’s side or are they on Rhaenyra’s side and Daemon’s side. The excitement now is that we get to fall into the more traditional rhythms of storytelling and see where that story is going to go.”
"We’ve always talked about this particular tale, and George has talked about it too, about this being a Shakespearean or Greek tragedy. Whereas the original series is like this big epic sweeping fantasy, about light and darkness, ice and fire, this series is very much about a house tearing itself apart from within. Now that all those pieces have been set on the board, I’m really excited to tell the next chapter, to see what happens now that Viserys is gone and is no longer keeping a lid on things."
We’re right there with him.
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