The third season of House of the Dragon is about to start shooting, and showrunner Ryan Condal gave some updates on the latest episode of his podcast The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of. Usually this podcast is about props, but Condal will occasionally share things about the Game of Thrones prequel as well.
This latest episode was actually recorded towards the end of January; you can tell because Condal and his cohost David Mandel are talking about the American Airlines plane-helicopter crash in Washinton, DC like it just happened. "I'm very tired this week," Condal said. "I've been talking a lot these past two weeks. We just finished our tone meetings. It was back to back to back. We had everybody in before the real crazy, director, location tech scouting happens. We're in the thick of prep. We're a short while away from filming...It's very soon."
What is a "tone meeting," you ask? I'll let Condal explain: "A tone meeting is the writer/creator/showrunner's chance with the director to kind of go through the script in excruciating detail — mine are five hours long, typically — scene by scene, beat by beat...and describe intention, and what is desired, and hit anything that might be in the scene that's not immediately apparent, like costume or props." So he might tell the director something like, "There are soldiers in the scene, here's how many, here's how they're dressed, here's what houses they're from."
These are apparently different from "concept meetings," which happen before tone meetings and go over things on an even more general level. At this point in the show's life cycle, he and the directors have a good working relationship. "We actually have a lot of returning directors this year, so there's a shorthand now and it's nice," Condal said. "If you're lucky enough to get to a season 3, they tend to be better experiences overall, because the gears are all kind of going in the same direction in a lot of ways. So it's been a lot of work, but it's been pretty fun and enjoyable, as far as making a season of this crazy show goes."
We've heard that director Clare Kilner, who directed episodes in both the first and second seasons of the show, is coming back. And we know that Nina Lopez-Corrado, who's worked on shows like The Night Agent and Perry Mason, is coming aboard this season. We don't know who the rest of the directors in the lineup are, but I'm guessing the remainder are all familiar faces.
House of the Dragon showrunner hints at mysterious prop from the books
Condal also confirmed that the scripts for season 3 "are all done," which jives with what the stars have said. "[W]e decided to do the tone meetings earlier than they usually do, just so that [the directors] had that information as they go into their storyboarding and final location scanning. So now they're planning all their stuff out with the tone meeting in mind."
Intriguingly, Condal also hinted at some prop they're making drawn from the books by George R.R. Martin. I'm not sure whether he's talking about the Song of Ice and Fire books, which formed the basis for Game of Thrones; or Fire & Blood, which forms the basis for House of the Dragon. Maybe both. I'll just transcribe what he said in full and let you come to your own conclusion:
"We have some really kind of specific things that we need to build. One of them is a very in-world thing that we've heard a lot about over the course of the writing of the books, and from the text of the books, but we haven't really ever, in my mind, I don't know that we've seen onscreen in a specific way. It's not a big thing. It's a smaller detail, but I just thought it was cool to like...It was one of those things where you kinda have to...You go and read everything, all the little snippets that are in the book and then you try and put the thing together...Take all the information you have and connect the dots as best you can and fill in the rest, much like doing an adaptation. So excited to see that come along, it's a fun one."
Honestly, I couldn't begin to guess. "There're insane sets being made, and costumes sowed," Condal continued. And he was "delighted" by what's being made in the weapons department.
Filming on House of the Dragon will reportedly run from March through October of this year. We can expect to new episodes to drop on HBO and Max sometime in 2026.
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