PA D DY CONSIDINE CAN’T BELIEVE WHERE HE’S SITTING.
For the very first time, the Burton-upon-trentborn actor has just parked his rear end on what is arguably the most recognisable chair in popular culture. Forged from more than a thousand swords of Aegon the Conqueror’s vanquished foes, it is the deliberately uncomfortable seat of power for the King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men. Namely, the Iron Throne, for which many a deadly game has been played, many a bloody battle fought.
Director/showrunner Miguel Sapochnik trots up the seven steps to join him on his lofty plinth. “How does it feel?” he asks. “This is great!” grins Considine, bewigged in platinum blond as King Viserys Targaryen, the First of His Name. “I never imagined in a million years I’d be playing a king. In any kingdom, never mind this one.”
The sheer pinch-me-ness of the moment is understandable. For this kingdom (technically seven) is Westeros, previously visited in the titanically successful HBO series Game Of Thrones. However, this is not a Westeros we’ve seen before. That much is evident to Considine as he surveys his surroundings. His Iron Throne is bigger and, well, swordier than the one last seen in May 2019. Dozens more blades jab out of its imposing structure, while the steps below are also festooned with swords, hundreds of them, angrily poking towards the ceiling of this Great Hall. “It looks very, very impressive,” a now wig-free Considine tells Empire, just over a year later. “I think people are gonna like it.”
Sapochnik and his fellow showrunner Ryan J. Condal (as well as no doubt every executive at HBO) are certainly hoping that’ll be true. After all, they’ve taken on the tough task of creating House Of The Dragon, the hugely ambitious prequel series to one of the most successful, beloved and epic TV series ever made. A successor show that promises to play a whole new, even deadlier, game.
“IT’S A TIME of greater decadence and influence,” says Condal. “That’s why the Iron Throne is dressed up so much grander. This particular story sees the Targaryens at the very apex of their wealth and power. I think that’s a fascinating story to tell.”
We didn’t see much of House Targaryen in Game Of Thrones. There was Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), of course, mothering her trio of dragons across the Narrow Sea, plus her short-lived older brother (another Viserys, the last of his name,
played by Harry Lloyd). But they were the final remnants of a fallen dynasty, genetically twisted by incest and thrown out of power with the usurpation of the mad king Aerys II. House Of The Dragon winds back the clock by about 170 years, to the family’s golden age. Westeros has long since been conquered by these platinumblond dragon-riders from the East, and they’ve secured peace in the realm for close to 60 years. However, as anyone who’s read George R.R. Martin’s 2018 book Fire And Blood (basically a sexed-up Silmarillion) will know, a storm is coming: ‘The Dance Of The Dragons’, a brutal internecine conflict between two rival Targaryen factions — and their many dragons — sparked by the issue of Viserys I’s succession. Specifically, his lack of a male heir, and his progressive-butdivisive decision to promise the Iron Throne to his only child and daughter, Rhaenyra (played in the show by both Milly Alcock, as the Young Rhaenyra, and Emma D’arcy).
Aptly, House Of The Dragon itself emerged from a problem of succession. “I remember when we were doing the press circuit for [Game Of Thrones] Season 8, they [HBO] were already talking about spin-offs,” says Sapochnik, director of such celebrated Thrones episodes as ‘Hardhome’, ‘Battle Of The Bastards’ and ‘The Long Night’. “At the time I mentioned to them, ‘You should speak with Ryan Condal,’ who I was developing a Conan [The Barbarian] project [for Amazon] with. They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and went forward with these five different writers: Max Borenstein, Carly Wray, Bryan Cogman, Jane Goldman and Brian Helgeland.”
It was an impressive array of scriptwriting talent, and this successor-show bake-off was seemingly won by Goldman, whose prequel concept, working-titled ‘Bloodmoon’, was set thousands of years earlier in the Age Of Heroes and concerned the origin of the zombie-like White Walkers. A pilot starring Naomi Watts and Jamie Campbell Bower was shot in 2019. But, for reasons still unclear, ‘Bloodmoon’ failed to impress the HBO brass. “We never got told what the problems were,” says Sapochnik.
It was during this time that his friend Condal phoned from the States and announced, “So I’m writing this ‘Dance Of The Dragons’ thing, and you’re my first, second and third choice for director.” In the meantime, it transpired, Condal had been contacted directly by George R.R. Martin. The two first became acquainted when Condal met the author back in 2012, while shooting his first pilot (“a supernatural Western”) in Martin’s hometown of Santa Fe. Condal had reached out to Martin as a fan (“I learned more about screenwriting from George’s books than reading how-to books on screenwriting”) and they’d stayed in touch ever since. Now, six years later, Martin had just finished Fire And Blood, though it wasn’t yet published, and told Condal that an adaptation of its ‘Dance Of The Dragons’ segment was his “passion project”.
“He hadn’t quite found the right writer yet,” Condal recalls. “He said, ‘You know my books, I really like you, I like your writing. I’d like you to take a shot at this, and I’d like to tell HBO to hire you.’ So I said, ‘That’s amazing.’ And my head exploded.” For Condal, this was “a dream job within a dream job”.
However, Sapochnik was a little more
reserved. Firstly, he didn’t want to merely direct; he wanted to partner with Condal as a showrunner, he tells Empire when we meet at House Of The Dragon’s post-production hub in London’s Soho in early July, only a day or two after he’s completed a fortnight of reshoots. Secondly, “From my perspective, it wasn’t immediately interesting, because it was stuff I’d already worked on: basically the same thing, with more dragons. And dragons are a nightmare to shoot. But I liked Ryan, so I said I would help, and in the process see if I could find something for me in it.”
Sapochnik was asking valid questions: why follow Game Of Thrones with just more Game Of Thrones? How could they make this show stand out? He would find his answer amid House Of The Dragon’s fascinating cast of characters.
“FUNDAMENTALLY, HOUSE OF The Dragon is a different animal,” says Emma D’arcy, previously seen in Frost/pegg supernatural comedy Truth Seekers and now ready to make their mark as the grown-up Princess Rhaenyra (D’arcy’s preferred pronouns are they/them). “I think we’d be really naive if we tried to mimic or emulate Game Of Thrones. I think the thing that’s distinct, and something I love about this season, is that it’s really rooted in the home. It’s domestic, it’s psychological, it’s interpersonal, it’s familial.”
Rhaenyra’s closest childhood friend is Alicent Hightower, played as an adult by Olivia Cooke
(Ready Player One, Bates Motel), who admits she felt “trepidation” at the idea of appearing in a Thrones follow-up, until she read the scripts. “It feels more intensely focused on one extended family, rather than many other families,” she says. “It’s much more nuclear than the other TV show, but still incredibly thrilling and intense and all the things we were excited about when we watched
Game Of Thrones.”
Alicent is the daughter of Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), the Hand of the King — “a highflying political creature, a black belt in statecraft, a pragmatist and a manipulator,” as Ifans puts it. Otto is pitted against Rhaenyra’s uncle, Viserys’ younger brother, whom he regards as “the king’s kryptonite,” Ifans says. “[He’s] volatile, violent and impulsive. Any influence he has on the king is detrimental to the status quo.”
This is Prince Daemon, played by Matt Smith, who of course has previous as a troublesome royal in the first two seasons of The Crown. “Daemon is there to cause chaos and piss people off because, simply, it entertains him,” Smith tells Empire. “He and Otto loathe one another. They’re winding each other up, needling one another. And in the middle of it is Paddy, who plays Viserys. They’re both vying for his attention and his love.”
This, as you’d imagine, is no picnic for the king, who is something we’ve rarely seen before in the world of Thrones: a good, well-meaning monarch. “He really shouldn’t be king,” says Considine. “He’s not really cut out to be a ruler. He’s a pleaser of people, but he feels a duty to his daughter, because she’s the only living child he had with [his wife] Aemma, who died. He doesn’t feel there’s anybody else he can trust to succeed him. Certainly not his brother Daemon! But the job tears him apart, and it starts to take its toll physically and mentally on him.” As it did on
Considine himself, to some degree. “I kept putting my hip out, because of how I was holding myself [as Viserys],” he laughs. “But, you know, you gotta do it, right?”
However, it was not Viserys’ travails that drew Sapochnik into House Of The Dragon, nor the rivalry between his Hand and his brother. The true attraction came from a eureka moment, courtesy of Alexis Raben, both the development executive at Sapochnik’s production company and his wife. (Raben also plays Talya in the show.) “One day, she said, ‘This would be much more interesting if it was about the two main female characters, rather than the male characters; if you really focused in on the patriarchy’s perception of women, and the fact that they’d rather destroy themselves than see a woman on the throne.’ That wasn’t a perspective I have ever told before. I think it made this show feel more contemporary, too. We said, ‘What if Alicent is like “Women for Trump”, and Rhaenyra’s like punk rock?’”
It required beefing up the role of Alicent, who’s not so prevalent in the book, and tracing the relationship between the two characters from childhood (Alicent is played as a child by Emily Carey). Cooke was particularly attracted to this idea of “how incredibly lonely it must be to be those two women, surrounded by men who just want to watch the world burn.” Meanwhile, D’arcy describes Rhaenyra and Alicent as “quasi siblings”, with a deep, enmeshed history. “They grow up in the same backyard, which happens to be the royal court. But Alicent is better at conforming to the requirements of court manoeuvres, and Rhaenyra is humming with the fire of old Targaryenism. It’s like an ally that lives inside her, and she has to learn when to dampen that fire and when to trust it. She’s surrounded by a trail of ashes.”
Empire wonders if this shift in perspective has drawn House Of The Dragon away from the explicit sex and violence that characterised its predecessor. Not at all, it turns out. “It’s still really full-blooded, but it doesn’t feel unnecessary,” says Cooke. “I feel like the actors definitely have more of a say, and there’s an intimacy coordinator, so [during the sex scenes] you feel protected as much as possible.”
Condal insists the show very much continues the legacy of Thrones being “a very adult fantasy”. When his four- and six-year-old daughters asked him how old they’d need to be to watch House Of The Dragon, he told them, “27,” he laughs. “But I don’t think there’s anything gratuitous. It’s a world where sex is used as a weapon and tradecraft. And we’ve used it to tell a story. It’s not just there for shock and awe, and for gratuitousness’ sake.”
Of course, it is not only the “adult” side of Game Of Thrones’ legacy that this new series must contend with. There is also the “fantasy” aspect. And it is here the show faced one of its greatest creative challenges: bringing to life all its flame-spewing monsters.
DURING GAME OF Thrones, we never see more dragons than Daenerys’ three ‘children’, primarily her black-scaled alpha boy Drogon. In the era of House Of The Dragon, there are no fewer than 17 recorded fire-breathers darkening the skies,
with the majority of these bred by and bonded to the Targaryens. “There’s a very symbiotic connection between the dragon rider and the dragon,” explains Smith (who describes Daemon’s own, Caraxes, as “a grumpy bastard”). “You’ve got to master it from an early age, and it’s a deathdefying experience trying to tame it. For want of a better analogy, it’s a bit like Avatar.”
Sapochnik confirms that, during the course of Season 1, we’ll meet nine of these 17, which promise to complement the show’s more focused, courtly set-up with some of the scale and spectacle viewers have come to expect from the saga. In other words, they’ll be making the show ‘nuclear’ in a very different sense. However, creating all these magnificent beasts took the task of making House Of the Dragon familiar-butdifferent to a whole new level.
“I’ve got a book which has hundreds of dragon [concept] designs,” says Sapochnik. “The first thing you want is not to do Drogon. So I came up with a whole theory about how there were three different kinds of dragons, based on their different skulls. We came up with all kinds of stuff. But in the end, we ended up back at Drogon,” he laughs. “There’s something about Drogon. It’s like the Millennium Falcon. It hit something. But each new dragon has its own personality. That’s what’s going on now in our last part of the animation — we’re applying personal character traits to each of the dragons. One of them’s got a gimpy leg. Another one’s much more like an eagle, because she’s kind of neurotic. And another one’s like a curmudgeonly old granny.”
If (re)imagining dragons was a test for Sapochnik, for Condal it was a joy. “They were a blast!” he says. “They were the most fun to work with because they do everything you ask them to! I’m very excited to unleash dragons on the world.”
They were fun to ride, too — according to D’arcy, at least. “We had an animatronic buck, which is controlled by a device that the director can use to plan each flight path,” they tell us. “Honestly, having done my first day on the buck, my takeaway was that every member of production ought to have the right to have a go. They should allot time slots. Someone can roast chestnuts out front. The most acting
I had to do was to wipe the grin off my face, because I can’t overstress how thrilling it is.”
WHILE D’ARCY WAS flying high, their showrunners were aiming high. And necessarily so. You’d think both Condal and Sapochnik felt some degree of pressure at having to surpass, or at least match, the spectacular-yet-subversive experience that Game Of Thrones delivered. However, neither of them seems particularly anxious. “I always joke that Miguel and I are following The Beatles,” says Condal. “But at least Miguel was one of The Beatles, at the end.”
When Empire asks the “Beatle” if he’s feeling any weight of expectation, he replies, “What, you mean following the thing I already did? No. I’m not.” He harks back to starting work on Game Of Thrones Season 6 highlight ‘Battle Of The Bastards’ and how the production office was fretting about it needing to top Season 5’s White Walker onslaught ‘Hardhome’ (also directed by Sapochnik). “Everyone kept saying, ‘We’ve got to
make sure it’s bigger!’ And I said, ‘No. We’ve just got to do a good job. And if we do a good job, then it will speak for itself.’”
There is a flip side to any Thrones-based expectation. The show’s final throes elicited a significant backlash from fans, especially those aghast at Daenerys’ apparent 12th-hour turn towards city-nuking tyranny. Was there any sense of course correction here? Of needing to consider those who voiced dismay at the way the series ended?
“Life doesn’t end the way you want it to!” says Sapochnik (who directed the very episode in which Dany torches King’s Landing). “I think we very much wanted to pay attention to not that.”
Condal concurs. “It doesn’t really factor in at all,” he says. “I think the minute you as a creator start playing defence, you’re just taking the ground out from beneath your feet. Should we be so lucky to have such a large and passionate fanbase that will debate our show! I think that in itself is a sign of success.”
Even so, he admits, there is a sense in which House Of The Dragon does address Daenerys’ ultimate power-craziness — in a subtle, ancestral way. “Daenerys resurrected this idea that, when you’re the only person in the world with nuclear weapons, you can either be a force for peace, or you can be a tyrant. And the line between those two things is very thin. That’s definitely something this show will explore.”
While George R.R. Martin’s complete history of what happens to Rhaenyra, Alicent and all those troublesome patriarchs is available for anyone to read, nobody involved in its adaptation will discuss how far into ‘The Dance Of The Dragons’ these upcoming ten episodes will take us. At the time of writing, a second season has not even been confirmed. However, Sapochnik does provide a hint, describing this season as “an origin story of these characters and the build to why these people go to war.” Whoever’s sat on the Iron Throne at the conclusion of Episode 10, it feels safe to say that there will be much more fire and blood to come.
HOUSE OF THE DRAGON IS ON SKY ATLANTIC AND NOW FROM 22 AUGUST