New House of the Dragon sets rise as filming on season 3 approaches

We return to Harrenhal and prepare for the Battle of the Gullet. Go behind the scenes of House of the Dragon season 3:
Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO

The second season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon wrapped up last year, and unfortunately we have a while to wait before we get new episodes. The good news is that cameras will start rolling on the third season very soon, and we know because we can already see the sets going up. @UnBoxPHD, bless their soul, has been uploading footage straight from the set of House of the Dragon season 3. Take a look below, but beware that you may encounter some SPOILERS.

This first video will probably be familiar to anybody watched the second season of House of the Dragon, which saw Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) visit the crumbling castle Harrenhal in the Riverlands. He spent a good deal of time in the godswood, which looks like what we're seeing here.

Daemon was still at Harrenhal by the end of season 2, but if House of the Dragon continues to adapt George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, he may not hang out there much longer; recall that, at the end of the season, Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) was marching on the castle. Without giving anything away, Harrenhal plays a big role in the story going forward no matter who's there, so I'm not surprised to see the set brought out again.

In another video, @UnBoxPHD takes us to a shipyard:

What we're looking at here is a massive ship captained by Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), who spent a surprisingly large amount of time in season 2 just kind of puttering around the dock fixing it up. He actually boarded the thing at the end of season 2, though, and looked like he was about to encounter an enemy fleet setting sail from Essos when the season abruptly ended.

In Fire & Blood, the fleet sailing out of Essos — captained by Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) in the show — will play a key role in the Battle of the Gullet, a major set piece that was originally going to close out the second season of the show before getting moved to the third. So we'll likely see a lot of Corlys' ship on the high seas when House of the Dragon season 3 finally graces our screens sometime in 2026. The set will be hopping soon as they film this battle.

@UnBoxPHD has lots of images worth looking at. There appears to be a second godswood set, as well as this mysterious pile of white-grey rocks:

Is it a wall with snow on top of it? Is it THE Wall? Is it just a pile of rocks and I'm reading too much into it? We may well find out more soon.

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