Westeros

The latest episode of The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of podcast, co-hosted by House of the Dragon show runner Ryan Condal and his friend and fellow prop collector David Mandel—whose credits include Seinfeld, Veep, and White House Plumbers—features prosthetics artist Waldo Mason, who joins them to discuss his career, creative process, and some behind-the-scenes teases from House of the Dragon Season 3 where he works as the lead makeup special effects artist.

Waldo Mason is a legendary figure in prosthetics, with a career spanning over thirty years. His work has brought creatures, wounds, and faces to life in films like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, the Harry Potter series, Game of Thrones, and Rogue One. He’s also a worked on a number of Ridley Scott productions going back to Gladiator (he has some frank remarks to make about a certain star’s behavior on set at the time), as well as Kingdom of Heaven and Prometheus.

In the episode, there’s a fun moment where Ryan hints there’s something in Season 3 he’d like to “liberate” for his own collection—prompting Waldo to laugh and ask, “Well, is it large?” Apparently not, but Ryan and he would confer about there maybe needing to be two of what object he was interested in. Waldo also shares that he was particularly eager to sculpt two specific heads this season. One didn’t appear in the initial brief, to his disappointment—but it sounds like it made it into the revised plan after all. See below for our guess, and beware spoilers drawn from Fire and Blood!

Among the podcasts I listen to on a weekly basis is the prop collecting-focused “The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of”, in part (but only in part!) because one of its hosts is House of the Dragon show runner and co-creator Ryan Condal (the other co-host? David Mandel, of Seinfeld and Veep fame whose White House Plumbers recently completed its run on HBO). Their areas of interest when it comes to collecting are very similar to what I—and I suspect many fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, and House of the Dragon—consider pretty central parts of my favorite cinema: big genre works of the late 70s and through the 80s like Conan the Barbarian, Alien and Aliens, Blade Runner, Indiana Jones, and (of course) Star Wars.

Their latest episode (embedded below) features a semi-regular feature of the podcast, where Condal and Mandel discuss an upcoming props auction and go through its catalog together, discussing bits of information they know about a piece or similar ones, speculating on whether the expected sale price is on the mark or too high/low, and whether they’ll be pursuing any particular items themselves. But color me surprised when they mentioned that Propstore’s upcoming Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction from June 28 to June 30th included two lots of scripts from Game of Thrones, apparently from Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger). I decided to examine what information Propstore provided about them, and discovered some fun details regarding scripts that Gillen had personally annotated.