Westeros
The 'A Song of Ice and Fire' Domain
News
Over at the movie prop collecting podcast The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, House of the Dragon co-creator Ryan Condal recently offered a window into the show’s production as the third season filming is hurtling to completion, detailing a tradition he’s started on the show.
Speaking with his co-host, David Mandel (Veep, Seinfeld), Condal confirmed that as the series moves into its later seasons, a growing number of principal characters are having their “series wrap”. Filmed sometime after the 13th or 14th based on remarks on a recent auction, Condal noted that in the last ten days or so of filming there were several such “wraps”. In the unforgiving world of Westeros, of course, we all know what that means. Condal, whose passion for props apparently amuses his show’s directors and writers, revealed that he has adopted a tradition inspired by Peter Jackson’s celebrated practice on The Lord of the Rings: sending off each departing actor with a significant prop tied to their character.
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!
House of the Dragon‘s third season officially kicked off a few days ago, and HBO wanted to make sure everyone knew it by having star Emma d’Arcy make the announcement in a video:
The fight for the Throne is far from over.
— House of the Dragon (@HouseofDragon) March 31, 2025
S3 of #HOTD is now in production. pic.twitter.com/NUe4POwIJM
There’s quite a bit more news besides that, however, as some new castings have been revealed… and a new interview with show runner and co-creator Ryan Condal responds to some questions from EW about the season to come… and gives his version of the situation that stirred a great deal of controversy preceding it.
As far as the casting goes, two northerners have been announced: Dan Fogler will play Ser Torrhen Manderly, and Tommy Flanagan will play
[Edit: Ryan Condal has since confirmed to us that Roderick is a lord on the show, not a knight.]
See the full press release that came with the announcement, and list of returning cast members as well as confirmed new ones, below!
At a recent Emmys FYC (“For Your Consideration” event), House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal, executive producer Sara Hess, and a bevy of key cast members teased a number of details about the in-production Season 3, which as yet does not have a release date (though it’ll certainly be sometime in 2026). Noting that cameras haven’t quite started rolling—on The Stuff Dreams Are MAde Of podcast, recorded a week or two so earlier, he noted he was in Wales for final location scouting—the showrunner revealed that writing was basically done on the season. Condal and company hinted that this season will cover four major events described in Fire and Blood, GRRM’s account on which the show is based, and that there would be some new faces in the cast but that most of the significant characters had already been introduced.
Touching on a subject very near and dear to our hearts, the House of the Dragon official podcast, hosted by Jason Concepcion and Greta Johnsen, has invited show runner Ryan Condal to answer a number of questions about adapting Fire and Blood to the screen. A lot of big topics are spoken of, including Nettles, Damon’s time in Harrenhal, Aegon’s prophetic dream, and more… and at the end, a discussion of George R.R. Martin’s role as an executive producer on the project which, I think, lays out a sense of how much role GRRM actually has at this stage in the production.
Interestingly, this is a surprise episode—two weeks ago, they announced that they’d have a final episode about now… but that one has been pushed into the future because, according to the hosts, they had so many fan questions sent to them after the finale about adaptation choices that they thought it was worth an added podcast. Things have been fairly quiet in the month since the show ended, though we suppose GRRM indicating issues with the season and making clear that he felt a lot has gone wrong on the show. NOTE: There are spoilers, not just for Fire and Blood, but GRRM reveals details about current plans for season 3.
But then, he has begun his promised post (archive link) about Blood and Cheese, and the butterfly effect it causes, and seems like he’ll go further in explaining his problems with the season.
ETA: An update, as HBO has issued a response via a spokesperson:
“There are few greater fans of George R.R. Martin and his book Fire & Blood than the creative team on House of the Dragon, both in production and at HBO. Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow. We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”
House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal and his co-host, David Mandel (Seinfeld, Veep, White House Plumbers), have returned for the latest season of their terrific props podcast, The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of. Occasionally, Ryan brings on guests from the crew of his show, and this latest episode features season 2 costume designer Caroline McCall going over her work on the show.
Well worth a listen. For those who want to skip the opening section discussing props (like Ryan’s consideration of how to display his recently-purchased Deckard jacket from Bladerunner) and comic art, the conversation with McCall starts at the 13:45 mark:
Among topics covered are the work on Ser Simon Strong’s costuming, bespoke armor design and budgetary considerations, the importance of the breakdown department, the use of heraldry, and more.
Earlier this week, Linda and I had the pleasure to once again interview House of the Dragon co-creator and show runner Ryan Condal. As we were able to do it after the airing of the first episode (you’ll find our video discussing the episode here), the fact that a lot of fans asked us to ask about the changes to Blood and Cheese when adapting Fire and Blood to the screen is a major topic. We also discuss new props, books he has read for research purposes, the new opening, the possibility of a new opening theme from Ramin Djawadi, unsung heroes of the production, and more!
In the course of promoting his upcoming Netflix original anime, Terminator: Zero, writer Mattson Tomlin did answer some questions from EW about progress on the Aegon the Conqueror series he’s developing for HBO.
Revealed back in February, Tomlin says it’s still very early on the script, but he’s been having a deal of back and forth discussion with George R.R. Martin about it.
Aegon the Conqueror on Balerion, the Black Dread.
HBO has released a two minute behind the scenes video featuring comments from showrunner Ryan Condal and an array of the show’s leading actors, including Matt Smith, Emma d’Arcy, Steve Toussaint, Olivia Cooke, and more. Lots of glimpses of heraldry, which we always love to see… but yet again we seem to be getting some confusion between who’s using the two-legged dragon and who is using the four-legged dragon. At this stage, I suspect they’ll never really hammer out the details on that one!
In other news from the world of HBO’s expanion of the Game of Thrones universe, Redanian Intelligence has reported, and which has since been verified and expanded on by The Hollywood Reporter‘s James Hibberd, that director Owen Harris was on board to direct episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Per Hibberd, Harris is directing three of the six episodes, which makes us wonder if Harry Bradbeer (also revealed by Redanian Intelligence) is directing the other three. For those who don’t know Harris’s name, he’s directed our favorite episode of Black Mirror, the widely-acclaimed (including winning a Hugo Award!) “San Junipero”.
Also, an interesting note from Hibberd that the show has lost its subtitle of “The Hedge Knight”. This could be a promising sign, in a way, since it could be taken to mean that HBO may be inclined to see this as a continuing series rather than a one-off limited series. We wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of the episodes gets titled “The Hedge Knight”.
Production on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set to begin next month. House of the Dragon returns to screens on June 16th.
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.
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.
As part of its Emmy awards coverage, Deadline has been publishing examples of episode scripts that have been submitted for consdieration as final nominees, and now we’ve come to House of the Dragon‘s turn as they have now published the pilot script for the first episode, “The Heirs of the Dragon”, and they’ve done so in a draft that includes various revisions, some of which were scenes or pieces of dialog that never made it to the final cut of the production.
There’s some particularly interesting discussion between Viserys and Daemon regarding the Targaryens and their dragons that was dropped, and I notice that it seems like our first introduction to Daemon was supposed to be his commanding the City Watch on its violent purge (notice that all the detailed description of Daemon and Dark Sister in that section)... but then at some point it was decided that instead we should first meet him in a scene that focuses his relationship to Rhaenyra, in the throne room.
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:
“George and Ryan are going to meet after the writers strike. They had originally planned to meet before the strike took place and that was to figure out at what point the series itself was going to end. Is it four seasons? I don’t think from where I sit at this point will be any less than four. But could be more. We’ll see.”
George R.R. Martin has posted to his “Not a Blog” to discuss the big news that HBO has ordered A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight (a working title, GRRM notes, that is not finalized) straight to series. George goes into some more detail about the project, pointing out that he first floated the Dunk & Egg stories for adaptation seven years ago, so things can move slowly… until they don’t. He also notes that despite reports (spurred by his own remarks that some things had been shelved, and some shifts of the Starling Inc. website that we reported on here), both the 10,000 Ships and Sea Snake shows remain in development. But more on that later.
On A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George has some particular new details to share:
Our premiere season will be an adaptation of the first of the three published novellas, “The Hedge Knight,” the tale of how Dunk & Egg first met during a tournament at Ashford Meadow. The pilot script is already written, and I think it’s terrific. It was written by Ira Parker, who is no stranger to Westeros. He was part of Ryan Condal’s writing staff for the first season of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, and wrote the fourth episode of Hot D’s first season, “King of the Narrow Sea.” That’s the one where Prince Daemon returns to King’s Landing after conquering the Stepstones, and takes Princess Rhaenyra down into the stews of Flea Bottom. Ryan Condal is on board as well, as an Executive Producer. So am I.
In a big presentation to announce their upcoming plans, including the launch of a new streaming service combining HBO MAX and Discovery+ called MAX, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they had ordered A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight straight to series (no pilot episode) with the following log-line describing the basic idea of the show, which is based on the Dunk & Egg novellas:
A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros… a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.
Fans have long wanted to see Dunk & Egg brought to the screen, as they give a very unique look into the Seven Kingdoms and the Targaryens from the eyes of a man of low birth who rises to great fame over his lifetime. Notably, HBO has also shared details about the writers and executive producers for this series.
