House of the Dragon boss Ryan Condal explains how season 2 filmed its biggest scenes

Earlier this year, HBO released the second season of its Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon, and proceeded to knock all our socks off with the epic scale of its special effects. Has there ever been a clash between dragons in the sky like the Battle of Rook's Rest? I certainly can't think of one.

We'll be waiting a while to see what happens next for the series; House of the Dragon won't start filming season 3 until early 2025, which means we won't be watching it until 2026. In the meantime, we tide ourselves over with snippets of news and glimpses behind the scenes. The latest of those comes courtesy of Vanity Fair, which sat down with showrunner Ryan Condal to discuss what went into filming some of House of the Dragon's biggest scenes for their new interview series The Craft Of...

Watch below, then we'll touch on some of the highlights:

We "still haven't met" all the dragons on House of the Dragon

Of course, Condal had to talk about the dragons and Rook's Rest. "There are 17 dragons that exist in the world at this point. We haven't met all of them yet. We try to give each their own sense of personality and character, and even going as far as having their own silhouettes and their own color palettes."

"They have their own sounds that they make," Condal added. "They're created by a mad scientist named Paula Fairfield. She is a creature sound designer. Everything is real and starts with an organic sound, so it's something that she's actually captured and recorded, and had a sound library file. And then in the sort of world of digital magic, she blends and amalgamates things like baby sounds, all the way to rhinoceroses charging, and she creates all of the sounds that a dragons makes."

The sound design for the dragons was a highlight of House of the Dragon season 2, so it's great to hear Condal shout it out. I still get chills remembering some of the vocalizations from Vermithor and Silverwing in the penultimate episode. As for Fairfield, she worked not only on House of the Dragon but Game of Thrones, where she won two Emmys. The amount of thought that she puts into the dragon sound design is pretty incredible, especially considering how many different dragons there on the prequel series.

Condal also talked about filming on the mechanical buck for the actual actors riding the dragons, which he says is one of the "most complicated things" they film for the series. "It requires, sometimes, location work, drone work, and then what we call buck work. The buck being of course the bucking bronco that all of the dragonriders have to sit on and be filmed, which tends to be a saddle on a motion rig that sits up in the air and then has a bunch of cameras pointed at it."

Stunt people set on fire are "the real heroes of House of the Dragon"

Condal also broke down the big set piece with the dragon Vermithor in the penultimate episode of the season, where a group of hopeful dragonriders shot their shot and (mostly) got burned to a crisp. "We talked about this being very much like a monster movie, like King Kong or Jurassic Park. For Rhaenyra, she's so desperate to turn the tide of war in her favor, that she basically put all these people out that she doesn't know for possible sacrifice. And that's what we see happen here in this horror show that Vermithor unleashes on the platform."

Condal explored the most dangerous sort of stunt that House of the Dragon does: setting people on fire. "This is a thing that I didn't even know until I was making the show," Condal continued. "Some performers are set on fire all the time. Very rarely do you do what's called a full burn, which is when the entire body is consumed in fire. It's obviously very dangers 'cause your whole body is on fire. But the thing that they don't tell you — hopefully they tell the stunt performers — you can't take a breath. If you take even a micro milimeter of breath, the fire will follow the air into your lungs and will burn you from the inside out."

"[W]hen somebody lights you on fire, the initial instinct is always to panic, and [the stunt performers] have to be trained out of that, because that's actually the biggest danger that follows them here is breathing, not anything else...I mean, credit to these guys. These are the real heroes of House of the Dragon."

- Ryan Condal

House of the Dragon boss is proud of final scene between Rhaenyra and Alicent

The final scene that Condal discusses is a quiet one: the meeting between Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) and Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) on Dragonstone in the season finale. "This is actually one of my favorite scenes in the show," Condal said. "I love this scene to end the season, because it brings us all back around to what this series was originally about, which is Alicent and Rhaenyra, and their two experiences that carry us through this horrible war that they're fighting."

As you might guess, Condal didn't have much to say in terms of the practical act of filming the scene; two people talking in a room is much easier to film than half a dozen people doused in dragon fire. But that seems to be one of the things that made it so appealing for Condal. Alicent and Rhaenyra's meeting represents the quiet heart of the story, without which the big spectacles wouldn't exist.

"Being able to end the season in such a internal and quiet place, that still has so much emotion and so many stakes associated with it, is the proudest thing for me," Condal said. "I think this scene is proof that the drama on the show is really deep and dense, and that it works and it carries the day. It's not just about the spectacle of the dragons and the wars and the battles and the fighting — which we all love — but that stuff doesn't matter if you don't care about the characters that are waging it."

Both seasons of House of the Dragon are currently available to stream on Max. Season 3 is expected to go into production in early 2025, so settle in for the wait. In the meantime, we'll be getting another new Game of Thrones prequel series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, sometime next year.

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