Westeros

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!

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.

Over the last weeks, HBO has been releasing a series of videos titled “Inside the Craft”, exploring different aspects of bringing House of the Dragon to life. The latest entry focuses on armor, and particularly the armor of the Gold Cloaks. It features show runner Ryan Condal, armourer Simon Brindle (who worked on Game of Thrones), and costume designer Jany Temime. Some really good, close-up looks at a number of suits of armor, and some glimpses of armor from the tourney in the first episode that were seeing only fleetingly:

The two previous videos were focused on the weapons and Dark Sister, and the costumes and Rhaenyra’s wedding dress.

The Writer’s Guild of America has begun a strike, which means members of the guild will not be writing for any productions they’re working on. There’s a lot of questions about just what this means for many productions, questions that Variety has tried to answer with its FAQ. But fans of House of the Dragon have worried about the show being delayed because of the strike, and as it happens, Variety has an answer for that question as well.

Per Variety, all the scripts for the season have been finished ahead of time, and production will continue. So, good news! However, as some may realize, most scripts are not completely done and in final form when a show is produced. There’s often talk of rewrites and the need to ADR (“Automated Dialogue Replacement”) to insert new dialogue or change existing dialogue. As Variety notes, it’s unclear just how that aspect of things will work for programs already in production. Will they take different footage from different angles to give them more wiggle-room to add entirely new dialog when a character’s mouth can’t be seen? Will they employ some of the new tech out there to simply dynamically change a character’s lips to the words they’re saying? We live in fascinating times, as it were.

To mark the occasion of the official start of production of House of the Dragon, HBO has put out a press release with the announcement, a remark from showrunner and lead writer Ryan Condal, and some other notes, plus a nice behind-the-scenes shot of the Iron Throne:

Hot on the heels of EW‘s exclusive, the Hollywood Reporter has published a two-part extravaganza from Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon chronicler James Hibberd (Part 1, Part 2 digging further into both the origins of House of the Dragon, its story and production, and the future of the show as well as other shows in the Game of Thrones universe.

Prince Daemon trying out his brothers chair.

A new report from Variety shares a piece of information from an anonymous “production insider”: the 10 episode first season of House of the Dragon managed an average per episode budget somewhat under $20 million. This is cited as a great achievement given rising production costs and the greater number of dragons that will need to be CGed in the series. Variety reports:

[T]he production insider says HBO is now so adept at these world-building series through years of not just GoT, but also producing Westworld”and His Dark Materials, that the team can make a high-quality series as efficiently and effectively as possible.

By way of comparison, the final season of Game of Thrones cost somewhere in the vicinity of $15 million an episode.

Random House has revealed their publishing plans for the summer, and fans have noticed that July seems particularly stacked with House of the Dragon tie-ins using Fire and Blood as the focal material.

First, Random House revealed that on July 12th they will publish tie-in editions of Fire and Blood that will feature a cover using photography from House of the Dragon. Second, Random House announced that the 2023 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar, to release on July 19, will be based entirely on Fire and Blood. And, in a departure from the previous calendars, this will feature an array of artists rather than just one. No word yet as to who has contributed.

Fans may notice these July dates, and speculation has run that the dating relates to the as-yet-unannounced premiere of House of the Dragon.

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Things have been quiet on the House of the Dragon front since their filming in Cornwall led to fans getting their first glimpses of some of the lead actors in costume. Now, thanks to Spanish newspaper Hoy, we learn (thanks to our friends at Los Siete Reinos) that House of the Dragon is set to film for three weeks in October in the Extremaduran city of Cáceres and the town of Trujillo. Both of these were used during filming of Game of Thrones, with the town of Trujillo providing the walls of King’s Landing and Cáceres as the location for a procession scene in King’s Landing featuring Euron Greyjoy as well as scenes set in Oldtown.

Per Los Siete Reinos, the three weeks would include pre-production time, so actual filming there will be shorter.

Update June 30th: A second article from Hoy concerning the filming in Cáceres also reveals that the show will be filming in the Portuguese village of Monsanto.

The second season of Ryan J. Condal’s and David H. Mandel’s podcast about movie props, The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, has launched. This first episode is ostensibly about the 40th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the bullwhip famously wielded by Indiana Jones, but in the course of it some hints about House of the Dragons were provided by Condal.

The first piece of information concerned plans for future episodes, with Condal stating that he’ll be getting one of the members of the HotD production to be a guest to discuss what he or she does. He did promise it would be spoiler-free, because otherwise he’d be fired, but we can expect some interesting discussion in the weeks to come.

The second piece of information was that Condal confirmed there would be “bespoke” swords for “heroes”—that is, custom-made swords for leads and significant characters—but that the armorer that has been hired for the show has a vast supply of swords from past productions he has worked on that will be among those used for background performers and the like. In fact, according to Condal, the supply of past weaponry or armor that an armorer or swordsmith can bring to a production is part of the calculation when deciding who to hire.

So, whoever is responsible for the swords on House of the Dragon is someone with a great deal of experience making swords for film and television productions. We would guess that they are also UK based, as it would just be very convenient. Interestingly, Condal mentioned Terry English (Excalibur, Aliens) several times in the course of the podcast, but a look at his credits suggest he may be retired from the gruelling production schedule.

After a deal of footage has made its way to the internet from photographers with long lenses, HBO has now released to media images of some of the costumed lead performers from House of the Dragon. These feature Emma D’Arcy and Matt Smith as Rhaenyra Targaryen and Daemon Targaryen, Steve Touissant as Corlys Velaryon, and Olivia Cooke and Rhys Ifans as Alicent Hightower and her father Otto Hightower. See the images below, with some comments.

Emma D’Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen” and Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen. Typical Targaryen looks, as expected. Rhaenyra’s costuming fits the description of her preferred colors and textiles such as maroon and velvets. Her long braid is also drawn from Martin’s description.

After a number of flame emojis were tweeted by the official Game of Thrones Twitter account, with the number growing every 15 minutes, the burst of flames culminated in the exciting announcement that production of House of the Dragon has commenced in a tweet with an intriguing picture of a distanced production team (including, if I’m not mistaken, showrunners Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan J. Condal):

Although we’re not generally planning to track details of filming of HBO’s House of the Dragon, a recent report from Cornwall Live caught our attention for a couple of reasons. One, we did not know that the famous Mont-Saint-Michel has a Cornish cousin in St. Michael’s Mount (apparently in close vicinity to Penzance harbor, of The Pirates of Penzance fame!) Secondly, and more to the point, one of the photos revealed what appears to be the show’s version of the heraldic arms of House Velaryon… and they don’t fit what George R. R. Martin confirmed to us over 20 years ago.

This mail, from our first year of correspondence with GRRM, refers to the fact that he had been visiting Westeros.org to look at the heraldry we had been producing from the books and then from his own notes. Though my original mail to him is lost, from context I think I must have remarked that we took a guess that he meant an actual seahorse and not the mythical or sea-horse (confusingly, both are also known as hippocampus).

GRRM has finally gotten his wish to break some news regarding House of the Dragon, revealing that British actor Fabien Frankel has been cast in the role of Criston Cole, a knight who will remembered (and reviled) in later days as the Kingmaker. A classically-trained actor who attended RADA and LAMBDA, he is a relative newcomer with his first credits in 2019 (the Emilia Clarke romcom Last Christmas, no less!) Most recently he has appeared in The Serpent, a BBC-Netflix co-production.

Fabien Frankel in Gone Today. Here Tomorrow.

According to a report from Icelandic news site Visir, it looks like Game of Thrones filming will wrap on the 24th or 25th. That’ll be 138 or 139 days—four and a half months—since production started. And much of it at a dead run, with at least two units, and sometimes three, working in four different locations across that time span.

So, the last few days of the production are happening right now. And according to Cat Talor, today’s a “BIG day”. Hrm… !