Now that production is in full swing, casting news for the second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon was sure to be around the corner… and today we get the first tranche of new actors and roles for the show, courtesy of Variety. All four are characters from the original source material, described in George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood:
All of these are more or less in line with what you would expect between the source material and choices made in the first season, though one can say that Alyn of Hull raises a couple of questions. First, Abubakar Salim is about 30 years old, whereas the character when introduced into the events of the Dance is still a teenager. Similarly, Alyn of Hull did not take part in the Stepstones campaign that Lord Corlys and Prince Daemon led. We’re going to guess that this change has been made to change the characterization of a significant relationship involving other, related characters.
Secondly, we get Alyn, but not his brother Addam, who is if anything even more important to the events of the Dance. Possibly they are still casting the role… but a common speculation has been that perhaps the two characters would be folded into one, a necessary compression for such a sprawling story. Or, alternatively, that Addam’s role would be taken over by some other character. We’ll have to wait and see on that.
(In other, recent news, House of the Dragon took three awards at BAFTA’s Television Crafts Awards: Make-up and Hair Design, Sound: Fiction, and Visual Effects.)