Westeros

HBO has just revealed that they have cast the two leads for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, known to fans world wide as Dunk and Egg. Peter Claffey, an Irish rugby player-turned-ctor, will be Ser Duncan the Tall. Dexter Sol Ansell has in turn been cast as Dunk’s squire Egg; Ansell’s been acting since the age of 4, and most recently appeared as the young Coriolanus in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set to begin filming in Northern Ireland, the old stomping grounds of Game of Thrones, in June with production likely to last several months.

Not just one but two trailers have dropped. A Black Trailer and a Green Trailer, further doubling own on the sides in the conflict.

It sounds like Thursday is likely to see a new trailer or teaser for the forthcoming second season of House of the Dragon, according to the latest post from the official sites. Two tweets promise that everyone must choose between “Team Green” and “Team Black”, and each tweet features dramatic images of some of the leading members of each party… plus our first look, I believe, at King Aegon II’s golden dragon (on green rather than the book canon black) that also answers one of the enduring heraldic questions of the show.

More on that below, but here’s the tweets:

ALL MUST CHOOSE. This promotional banner features the Greens and the Blacks, represented by Aegon, Ser Criston Cole, Aemond, and Alicent on the one side, and Rhaenyra, Daemon, Rhaenys, as well as Corlys Velaryon on the other.

Interesting news broke last night that HBO is gearing up to explore the extensive history of Westeros with a new spinoff series centered around Aegon’s Conquest. According to a report from James Hibberd and Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter, the network has enlisted much-in-demand writer Mattson Tomlin to develop the project.

Last year, we noted news out of Variety that HBO had starting looking into bringing Aegon’s Conquest to the small screen (and, perhaps, even the big screen—a theatrical lead-in was under discussion) and actively sought a writer to head the development of this thrilling prequel series. That search seems to have ended.

The burning of Harrenhal during Aegon’s Conquest, as depicted by artist Marc Simonetti for the 2023 World of Fire and Blood Calendar

A press release from the WB Shop brought to our attention that HBO is releasing some new House of the Dragon merchandise for this year, taking inspiration from the forthcoming Lunar New Year on February 10th to dub this the “Year of the Dragon”. As you’d expect, there’s a strong dragon-focus.

We’ll point out some of the items they make a point of, after this pretty cool banner featuring Caraxes

At this year’s Primetime Creative Arts Emmys, House of the Dragon entered the show with a total of eight nominations in the category (plus a final, yet-to-be-determined, nomination in the regular Emmys for Outstanding Drama). Unfortunately, other shows—particularly HBO sibling The Last of Us—snatched away most of the prizes, but in one category the show proved victorious: Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-fi Costumes! Leading the names credited with the victory was season 1 costume designer Jany Temime, who posted about it on her Instagram:

The Primetime Emmys will air next Sunday.

Last week, George posted an update to Not a Blog recounting a trip he took to the UK in late October and early November, in which he refers to meetings with his UK publishers concerning both A Song of Ice and Fire and Wild Cards, and then added some details regarding the play currently called The Iron Throne (it’s a working title):

The play was first announced way back in March of 2021. Dominic and Duncan would be Dominic Macmillan, the play’s director, and Duncan Cooke, the playwright.

And then George wrote a bit about his days working with Ryan Condal and the writers of House of the Dragon....

George R.R. Martin and House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal on the set of the TV show, in what may be the godswood of Harrenhal.

At a press event, HBO’s Casey Bloys unveiled a first-look trailer at the second season of House of the Dragon, according to Variety. While details of the trailer are embargoed, we’re guessing that it’ll air within the month, and perhaps within days.

Bloys also indicated something that seems to confirm our speculation when a casting call went out in the UK: Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight is “will begin shooting next spring, pending the end of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.” That caveat is a curious detail there, which suggests that they plan for at least one significant role going to a North American actor… or maybe they’re just wanting to leave open the possibility? But I’m guessing the former, they have their sights on someone.

Will those fan-casting Oscar Isaac as Baelor Breakspear be getting their wish? We’ll have to wait and see!

With the recent end of the WGA strike (the second longest in its history), Variety has issued a report touching on Hollywood trying to get back into motion after the work stoppage, citing a number of shows. One paragraph in particular, however, discusses HBO specifically, noting that a number of their shows saw no production at all… but one big one, House of the Dragon, has in fact wrapped filming:

Summer 2024 sounds pretty good to us.

Of course, besides HotD, the end of the strike also means that scriptwriting can resume on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which HBO had ordered straight to series just before the strike.

Back in May, the beginning of the WGA strike shuttered many productions, but not House of the Dragon. Now SAG-AFTRA has called a strike for many of the same reasons as the WGA… but it’s currently being reported that a couple of UK-based productions will continue filming because actors who are members of SAG are also members of the UK’s Equity, and their contracts are (allegedly) under the terms of Equity. And of course, one of those productions not shutting down (reportedly) is, once again, House of the Dragon. According to the Deadline article, the UK’s laws don’t allow sympathetic strikes, and actors are receiving guidance telling them to continue to report in to work if their contracts are under Equity rather than SAG.

This year’s nominees for the Emmys have been announced, and HBO’s House of the Dragon has done well for itself with six

eight (or nine, sort of) nominations, contributing to the phenomenal HBO/MAX total nominations of 127, and tying a decades-old record (set by CBS in 1973 and matched by NBC in 1993) of 4 separate dramas nominated in Best Drama.  See the categories below!

Very interesting report from Deadline Hollywood‘s Nellie Andreeva following an interview with Franesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. It’s a wide-ranging interview covering a lot of HBO’s shows, but for our purposes, the most interesting tidbits relate to House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, and potential other Westeros shows.

Addressing the on-going production of season 2 of House of the Dragon, Orsi noted that HBO was fully prepared to rewrite and reshoot anything that needed fixing once the WGA strike ends and the writers can take up their pens again to do writing work, but until then they are confident with the completed scripts they had to work with and have not dealyed producation at all. Speaking of a potential season 3 approval, it sounds like they’re not far from giving an immediate go ahead to season 3 to try and improve the turnaround from season to season. That said, how many seasons for the show in total remains a question:

As they say, the best laid plans of mice and men… but at last we finished our promised season 1 overview/discussion of House of the Dragon, which you can see here:

We’ve some other odds and ends to discuss, such as an extra video we did discussing the finale after Elio’s return from Spain, and a podcast Elio recorded for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, details about which you can find below!

Arrax approaching Storm’s End.

Today is the day: The Rise of the Dragon has hit book shelves in many countries! It’s also available as an e-book ... and even as an audio book, read by the wonderful Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones) which is a particular honor since we’re huge fans of his. We’ve been amazed by the positive response online, especially at the various art previews, and we have to say we owe a lot to all the artists who worked hard to make this what this is. There’s a lot of promotion going on, but one we particularly enjoyed is this trailer from our terrific UK publisher, Harper Voyager:

In the lead up to today’s release, George R.R. Martin took part in an online event where he spoke with friend and author David Anthony Durham to promote the book as well as House of the Dragon. While the stream has not been publicly released as of yet, read below for some of our realtime tweeting of some choice remarks and information from George… including an update on progress on The Winds of Winter!

The final episode of the first season of House of the Dragon is done, and we’re (actually, just Linda initially, but we’ll have more videos in the days to come) back with some thoughts, background, commentary on changes, and more in our latest video at the Westeros.org Youtube channel:

And that concludes the first season of House of the Dragon! The Dance has truly begun.

Rhaenyra by the Painted Table, lit by fire from below.