Just before the cast and creators of HBO’s House of the Dragon sat down for a highly-anticipated Friday night panel at SXSW London, a teaser reel played, crowing about the many ways the third season, premiering on June 21, will be bigger and badder than anything that’s come before it.
And while numbers like “15,000 stunt crowds” and “3,500 props” and “25 tons of propane” were plenty impressive, the one that stood out, flashing across an image of a giant warship exploding in a ball of fire, was “23 stunt performers ignited in one take — a new world record!”
Soon, series showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal declared, “These sequences, I will confidently say, are unlike anything that’s ever been done on television before.”
Book readers know immediately that he’s referring to The Battle of the Gullet, an epic and gruesomely bloody clash that takes place across land and sea and is the defining centerpiece of Targaryen civil war in House of the Dragon that predates the events of The Game of Thrones by about 200 years. The entire series has been leading up to this moment, which even fictional historians would deem to be the bloodiest naval battle in Westerosi history, and — hooray, dear viewers! — we’re getting it straight away in episode one of the new season.
“This has been haunting Jim and I for the better part of four years now,” Condal joked, motioning toward production designer Jim Clay, sitting beside him, and adding that Kevin de la Noy, the show’s physical producer, was just as big a co-conspirator — though he also apparently complained about the budget the whole time.
“The amount of construction that you guys did for just the one episode is kind of crazy and frankly irresponsible,” Condal continued, teasing. “But it was necessary to tell the story, and this is such a seminal moment for the show.”
The big theme of the season, according to Condal, is “what does the Iron Throne do to you when you’re in proximity of it?” And the feeling as it progresses is that of “inexorability,” that there was once a chance to claw back from the abyss of the family feud, but at some point that’s going to get completely lost.
The conflict was originally sparked by a fatal misunderstanding at the end of season one, when the dying King Viserys (Paddy Considine) whispers a prophecy about “Aegon the Conqueror” to Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke). Alicent mistakenly thinks her husband has ordered their son Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) to become king instead of his chosen heir, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). As Alicent and her cohort crown King Aegon II and shut down the Red Keep, Rhaenyra takes off on her dragon to go on the attack. Season two ended as family tensions turned into a full-scale civil war.
Season three picks up seconds after that. On Rhaenyra’s side, crucially, is Lord Corlys Velaryon, a.k.a. “The Sea Snake” (Steve Toussaint, who is bald when he isn’t wearing his magnificent wig of blonde dreadlocks), who uses his mighty fleet to block The Gullet, a narrow stretch of water, effectively cutting off King’s Landing from trade, food supplies and the rest of the world, while Rhaenyra’s dragon riders attack them from the sky. But King Aegon II’s supporters have also secured their own fleet, led by the pirate-like Admiral Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn), who became the sworn ally of Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) after he beat her in mud wrestling at the end of season two. As a bonus, she hates The Sea Snake, and is highly motivated to sink his fleet so she can rule the high seas.
There was never a question about spending every possible bit of budget to show it, said Condal. “I’m a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and I always said it’s like if you were making Lord of the Rings, and were like, well, maybe we could just say, ‘Man, Helm’s Deep! That was a crazy battle! You shoulda been there! You shoulda seen it!’ No. You have to show The Battle of Helms Deep.”
The end result, he said, required building a wet tank, a dry tank, an underwater tank, four boat sets, and then using three million liters of water.
First, they built The Sea Snake’s full boat (which Condal seemed to say is called “The Queen That Never Was,” after the tragic nickname for Rhaenys, Lord Corlys’ late wife) and put it in the “dry tank,” mounted on a gimble. That tank was the invention of the visual effects team who wanted some of the battle scenes to be filmed on a clean, dry ship onto which they could impose digital water. Then they built another part of the same Queen That Never Was ship, put into the wet tank and staged a bunch of scenes on that while drenching the actors in water. Then they did the same with Sharako’s ship, Bitchfist, which was also set up on railway tracks so it could crash into the Queen That Never Was.
“I had to try to keep a straight face when [director] Loni [Peristere] told me my ship was named Bitchfist,” said Thorn. “I just loved that she named it that, too!”
To prep, each actor was briefed with models and pictures, plus discussions of the emotional journey their character is going through during the battle, and weeks and weeks of stunt choreography.
“I didn’t know about that!” said Harry Collett, who plays Rhaenyra’s son, Prince Jacaerys.
“Dragon-man!” said Toussaint, rolling his eyes, teasing.
“We were in the trenches!” added Thorn.
It was one thing to train in a massive gym, and quite another to try their stunts on a tiny boat set that was constantly covered in slippery water and fake blood and moving up and down and side to side. “Of course when we were doing the training fights, we were all in tracksuits, making wonderful sexy moves, and then once I put the armor on, I couldn’t move in it!” said Toussaint. “There was one move that I had where I was supposed to kick somebody in the chest, and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s gonna look sexy,’ and then I put the armor on, I couldn’t get my feet above his knees!”
They were also shooting in England in the summer, and when he took off his armor, Toussaint said, “it was just like soup,” gesturing at an imaginary pool of sweat and other fluids at his feet.
Thorn said she put on 10 to 15kg (22 to 33 pounds) doing sword fighting and boxing training, only to get to set and feel like a complete novice. “All the stunt team have doubled for superheroes in the past!” she said. “So the people who trained us to fight were Captain America, Deadpool and Wonder Woman.”
Abubakar Salim, who plays Alyn of Hull, and was revealed in season two to be the secret bastard son of Lord Corlys, said his biggest issue was that his helmet kept slipping down and falling over his eyes. “But I think it helped sell the madness and the chaos that was on the actual deck itself, and the kind of primal energy that takes over in a fight.” They’d rehearsed for months, but as soon as Peristere called “action” for the first clash, he said, “the energy was almost like a mosh pit and it was frightening because it wasn’t about picking sides; it was about surviving and you could feel that. I remember swiping against someone on my own side and being like, ‘No! You should be swiping over here!’ But I think that’s what’s kind of cool and magical about it.”
What wasn’t cool and magical was the swarm of wasps who attacked them in the middle of battle, or the time Thorn accidentally got set on fire for being “somewhere I shouldn’t have been…. I remember shouting down from the boat, like, ‘Is there anything flammable in the wig?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah! Hair!’”
Collett, meanwhile, stayed mostly in the studio, trying to figure out how to emote while on a dragon. “The wind machine was so loud that Loni, our director, had a megaphone the entire time and was just shouting notes through that, which — I was just rolling with laughter. It was so funny.”
But the funniest part of all might have been the surreal experience of shooting on the same lot as HBO’s new Harry Potter series. When they were on the deck of the ship, they could see to the lot next door and straight onto Privet Drive.
“I was out there standing on the ship and I was like, ‘I didn’t realize we had built so close to this housing development, and why is the housing development like that? It’s only half a house. I guess times are tough or whatever,’” said Condal. “But then I was talking to my counterpart on that show, who said she was really enjoying standing with all the kids in this little idyllic ‘90s village, looking up at the massive medieval sea battle. So we were sort of waving to each other from two sides of the fantasy land.”
The show’s been picked up for season four and the moderator asked if Condal was thinking he had more seasons in him.
“No,” he said definitively, to big laughs. “I can do four.”
