Westeros
The 'A Song of Ice and Fire' Domain
News
Today marks GRRM’s 78th birthday, and there’s a nice early gift for George ahead of the occasion, thanks to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms winning its very first Emmy Award in its inaugural outing!
At the 78th Emmy Awards, the series took home the award for Outstanding Stunt Performance. The award went to the stunt performers Zach Roberts, Gyula Tóth, Chris Cox and Jake Cox for their (spectacular) work on “In the Name of the Mother,” the fifth episode of the show’s first season which featured the much-anticipated trial of seven sequence.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms had received nine nominations in all, including Outstanding Drama Series, which was a great result for the show.
George nevertheless had plenty of reason to celebrate, and took part in pre-Emmy and afterparty events, as well as attending the award show alongside show runner Ira Parker and actors Peter Claffey, Dexter Sol Ansell, and more from the show.
George R.R. Martin and Dexter Sol Ansell (Egg) at the Emmy afterparty.
New York Comic Con returns from October 9th through 12th at the Javits Center, and with it comes its lists of guests. Prominent among them, listed as a guest of honor, is George R.R. Martin. With the Seattle Worldcon in August, this may be the only convention appearances GRRM will be making this year. According to the information on the NYCC page, George will be there on Friday and Saturday. Reports are that the Saturday is entirely sold out, but there may still be tickets for Friday.
(Fun fact: George not only attended the first New York Comiccon in 1964, but was the very first person to shell out $1.50 for a ticket.)
Speaking of big media conventions, Ryan Condal confirmed in the latest episode of his prop collecting podcast, The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of, that there were no plans to promote the still-filming House of the Dragon at San Diego Comic Con as they did last year. In fact, it will be the first SDCC Condal will have missed since moving to LA (barring the Covid years when it did not take place) due to how intense a period July would be for production, and seemed quite sad about it. However, he promised he would push to return to the show next year, citing how much he enjoyed the screening (of last season’s episode 7) and hoped they would repeat something like that.
Over at Not a Blog, George R.R. Martin has continued his promised updates about his recent travels, this time discussing his visit to the HBO production of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (George notes it may still end up having The Hedge Knight as the title). This one’s quite special, because George features a number of candid, behind-the-scenes photos from his visits showing the Ashford meadow tourney grounds set, as well as actors in costume including the eponymous Ser Duncan the Tall (played by Peter Claffey) and the cousins Fossoway as well.
Another episode aired, and we’re rapidly approaching the end of the second season of House of the Dragon. As usual, Linda and I have posted a video recapping the episode and discussing its deviations from the source material in Fire and Blood, illuminating background that may not be obvious to viewers, and some dragon lore.
And, speaking of dragon lore, a lengthy post on dragons, their legs, and their habits from GRRM got a lot of attention almost two weeks ago. Given that some of what he talks about seems related to House of the Dragon, we’re going to add some of our own thoughts ... following the video, and the extras that HBO released around the episode.
Over at Not A Blog, George R.R. Martin provided an update on the casting of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is currently in production in Northern Ireland. We’ve previously
shared the casting of the two leads, but GRRM reveals that a number of other key roles have been cast. . . but it looks like HBO isn’t quite ready to reveal who they are, so they will remain nameless:
Most of the auditions — not all, but most — are done, and we should be able to announce some more cast members shortly. We have our Tanselle, Steely Pate, Baelor Breakspear, the Laughing Storm, a couple of Fossoways, Aerion Brightflame (boo, hiss), Prince Maekar, and the rest. Lists are being built on Ashford Meadow. I am told they just had the first table read, and that it went great.
As we don’t know who most of the roles are (except for Egg, played by young actor Dexter Sol Ansell, whose video of getting his head shaved is featured in George’s post) we’ll present a gallery below of art by Roman Papsuev (remembered by fans from the early days as Amok or Amoka), commissioned by the Dabel Brothers and based, I believe, on Mike S. Miller’s designs for The Hedge Knight comic book.
Egg, by Roman Papsuev
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):
And since we are talking theatre… one of the meetings I had in London was with Dominick and Duncan, the director and scriptwriter of our own stage play, the one we have been working on for the past few years. Originally we were calling it HARRENHAL, but we have now settled on THE IRON THRONE as a title… until we think of something better. Regardless, things are coming well, I think, and we are hopeful of being able to open in late 2024. Maybe. But you never know. There’s still a lot of work to be done.
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.
It’s become an increasing trend among creators to have Patreons where they can connect more directly with fans, and with the launch of Highgarden Entertainment George R.R. Martin has joined the bandwagon—but with a twist. As some may know, George has poured time and money into supporting the arts and commerce in his home of Santa Fe, NM. Most notably, he saved the Jean Cocteau Cinema which is now a venue for independent and genre films as well as talks with authors and filmmakers, and opened up his own bookstore, Beastly Books. The Patreon has three separate segments (which can be combined into one offering at a discount): one focused on GRRM, one focused on the Jean Cocteau Cinema, and one focused on Beastly Books.
A pleasant surprise today, as the official Game of Thrones channels dropped a new video, this time a rather unique one as it had George R.R. Martin narrating the history of the Targaryens (as well as the Hightowers and Velaryons) that leads up to the time of The House of the Dragons, with animated graphics from none other than artist Doug Wheatley, the illustrator of Fire and Blood.
Very interesting that the Hightowers get a little bit of focus in this video. The Velaryons are to be expected, of course, although an interesting thing we noticed about this video is that it only mentions the marriage of Corlys to Rhaenys as one of the ties the families have to one another, when of course Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters had a Velaryon mother. It’s a short video, but since Aegon and the Conquest was mentioned, it seemed like a detail they could have slipped in there if they wanted to.
The last few days have been jam-packed with House of the Dragon information, all of it leading to the big panel a San Diego Comic-Con, and the August 21st premiere of the show beyond that. The latest? A video from HBO giving us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the show in production, with brief comments from show runners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, and creator George R.R. Martin:
But what really kicked it of was Entertainment Weekly and its exclusive article from Nick Romano, who visited the sit and spoke extensively with the cast and crew of the show. Since that initial release, EW has been releasing more articles and photos on a daily basis, again leading up to the big SDCC premiere.
HBO has announced which members of the House of the Dragon cast and crew will be present for the panel at Main Hall H during San Diego Comic-Con... and have now unveiled their plans for both an at-event special interactive experience for attendees and the release of an Augmented Reality game called House of the Dragon:DracARys (see what they did there?) for Android and iOs devices. See below for more information!
A new book released today, James Andrew Miller’s Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, is a massive 1,000 page tome that looks at the rise of HBO as the destination for prestige television from the past and all the way to the present. In the course of it, of course, the book can’t but help touch on Game of Thrones. While it covers ground already revealed in past interviews and books (such as James Hibberd’s Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon), there’s a few new details… particularly from a voice fans have not heard before, George R.R. Martin’s long-time entertainment agent, Paul Haas, concerning the final season and its relation to GRRM’s plans for A Song of Ice and Fire.
[Note: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links.]
George R.R. Martin in the Eyrie on the set of Game of Thrones.
Today marks the 73rd birthday of one George Raymond Richard Martin, known and beloved as George R. R. Martin, or GRRM for short. George has posted a brief remark on this happy occasion at “Not a Blog”, quoting from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.
Elden Ring, a game from Dark Souls-developer FromSoftware whose world and story was created in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, now has a release date: January 21st, 2022. A trailer was also revealed showing some of the gameplay and the amazing environment and character design that FromSoftware is famous for:
The game was first announced this month two years ago, and Hidetaka Miyazaki sat for an interview that discussed just how and why GRRM got involved (TL;DR: he’s a fan of his work from well before A Song of Ice and Fire).
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, George R.R. Martin has renewed his overall deal with HBO, this time for a reported “mid-eight figure” contract that spans five years. An overall deal is one in which any new ideas or pitches a creator generates will belong to the studio. George first signed an overall deal with HBO back in 2013, which was then renewed in 2016. The article proceeds to run through the five projects in various stages of development, as well as House of the Dragon which begins filming next month if all goes to plan. We did like the speculation on the animated project:
It’s one of those days again, it seems. Shortly after we shared news on the status of the Wild Cards TV adaptation, George R.R. Martin posted his own update. The first was an item we had forgotten to post an update about, namely that just after we revealed that Sandkings was in development at Netflix, by sheer coincidence Collider had learned in an interview that director Gore Verbinski (Rango, Pirates of the Caribbean) was set to direct it, with screenwriter Dennis Kelly (Utopia) writing the script for the high-budget film adaptation of the famous, award-winning science fiction horror story.
George goes on to fill in some details on some other projects, some of which touch on things we recently revealed.
Screenshot from the 1995 Outer Limits adaptation of “Sandkings”. The “castle” features the face of Dr. Simon Kress, played by Beau Bridges in the episode.