Westeros

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!

The third and final day of the Heritage Auctions Game of Thrones prop and costume auction drew to a close, and did so with a bang (we’ve recapped Day 1 and Day 2 in previous posts). Mid-way through the auction of the last ~300 items, an auctioneer announced that it had now become the 2nd highest grossing Entertainment prop and costume auction in history, and was now chasing the legendary Debbie Reynold’s auction of 2011. While it did not meet that number, it came close with a total of $22,115,719 in sales including the buyers’ premiums.

And a big chunk of the $8.5 million raised on that final day came in the form of the touring Iron Throne which went for a whopping $1.49 million dollars. An absolutely stunning sum, by any measure, especially when you consider that HBO made more than one replica throne for exhibitions and tours… and that for a brief time you could order your own replica through the HBO Store for a cool $30,000. I strongly suspect we’ll be seeing another Iron Throne put to auction in the future, given this result.

Could this throne, displayed at Stockholm’s Royal Armoury back in 2014, be the same that sold at auction? A close inspection comparing it to Heritage’s photos certainly show no obvious diferences, but as we said, there were multiple of these and they may well all have been pretty exact replicas!

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.

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.

Ryan Condal’s and David Mandel’s The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of podcast about movie and television prop collecting has returned after a mid-season hiatus, and it starts with a bang as Condal recruits none other than George R. R. Martin to discuss his own history as a collector, as well as just a wee bit of discussion of House of the Dragons at the end. Fans should find this one pretty interesting, in particular George’s feelings regarding the ideal adapters of his work going forward.

Discussion of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon related matter begins around the 1 hour, 18 minute mark.

Last month, we shared that Ryan J. Condal’s and David H. Mandel’s podcast focused on film and television props, The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, would have an episode featuring a head of department from House of the Dragon. That episode has now aired, and reveals (among other things) that the show’s master armourer and head of the armoury department (which provides all the weapons for the show) is Tim Lewis, a leading armourer in the film industry with credits such as The Outlaw King, The Old Guard, and Ridley Scott’s upcoming The Last Duel.

Lewis’s website includes an extensive gallery of some of his work across a number of films. In the course of the podcast, Condal and Lewis of course discussed a bit of what’s going on on House of the Dragon. More details below:

Swords made for The Outlaw King and Macbeth, designed by Tim Lewis.

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.