‘House of the Dragon’ Showrunner on the Battle of the Esophagus

“House of the Dragon” showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal told a howling audience at Shoreditch Town Hall in East London that Season 3 would deliver on the promise of the previous season, and that the Battle of the Gullet sequence that kicks off the new season is “unlike anything that has ever been done on television before.”

“The whole pot that came to a boil at the end of Season 2 is going to come back to a boil in Season 3, and you have divided factions on both sides, but now there are divisions within the divisions, and those things are going to continue to fracture, and we’re going to continue to see selfish people do terrible things in the name of pride and power and ego and self and family,” Condal told Empire’s Helen O’Hara, who moderated Friday’s session at SXSW London.

Actor Steve Toussaint explained where his character, Lord Corlys Velaryon, aka ‘The Sea Snake’, was at the start of Season 3: “When I first met Ryan, he said we were going to start with a character who has everything, and we’re going to take it all away from him. Well, he’s on that journey. When we meet him at the beginning of Season 3, he’s still grieving for his wife. [Rhaenys Targaryen] and desperately trying to establish ties with his illegitimate son [Alyn of Hull]who doesn’t want anything to do with him, and so he basically has to deal with that, and that’s a hard sell.

Harry Collett, who plays Prince Jacaerys “Jace” Velaryon, said of his character’s relationship with his mother, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, who tries to assert her authority over him: “Yeah, he’s really just a grumpy teenager. He just thinks his mother is wrong, and that she fell into these traps right before his eyes, and he thinks he’s the best man in the room, but he’s just a But yeah, he was born to be a leader, so he will always have that quality.”

Abubakar Salim, who plays Alyn, pushed back against the suggestion that we’ll see his character’s tough personality soften in Season 3, but he did say, “I think we’re seeing him mature. It’s really interesting because we left Season 2 with him very volatile and angry and tried Corlys. So I feel like we’re coming in with that kind of vulnerability and rawness from the beginning. So yeah, I think we’re seeing him mature and kind this season.” evolve with what happens.”

Admiral Sharako Lohar, played by Abigail Thorn, had just been introduced in the final episode of Season 2 and was engaged in a mud wrestling match with Tyland Lannister. The character is lightly sketched in the source material, George RR Martin’s ‘Fire & Blood’, but Thorn has developed her own backstory for Sharako. “I have my own answers in my head about what exactly happened between her and Corlys that made her so dedicated to the task of bringing him down,” she said, “and besides, I was really inspired this season by ‘Moby-Dick.’ I’ve read the novel and I’ve watched every possible adaptation because she is Captain Ahab this season. She is on a quest to take down her white whale, and we will see how far she will go to achieve that.”

Toussaint added: “Yes, I think we both have that thing, this inexorable attraction for each other, that this has to be a final phase; it’s been going on for years and years, and if they get me then it will be something.”

Season 3 begins with the Battle of the Esophagus, one of the most important military battles of the Civil War known as the Dance of the Dragons. It’s something Condal and production designer Jim Clay have been working on for a while. “Yes, this has haunted Jim and me for almost four years now, and Kevin de la Noy, our physical producer, who had to logistically plan and pay for this whole thing. But yes, this sequence I will say with confidence, unlike anything that has ever been done on television before,” Condal said. “Certainly, the amount of construction you have [referring to Clay and his team] only did for one episode is kind of crazy and quite frankly irresponsible. But it was necessary to tell the story. I mean, this is such a pivotal moment in the show.

“I’m a big fan of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and I’ve always said it’s like making ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and then we say, ‘Maybe we can just say, ‘Well, you know man, Helm’s Deep, that was a crazy battle, you should have been there, you should have seen it.'” No, you have to show the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and with this story I felt like we had gotten there too, and how we did it. we had to dramatize this moment, that even within the bloody, terrible history of the Dance of the Dragons, the Esophagus stands out, even to those historians [of Westeros]as one of the worst things that happened in that history. We had to dramatize it, we had to show it, so it took a lot of blueprints, and…’

With that, Clay continued the sentence: “…a huge number of pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle, which eventually came together through all the different departments, and these great guys put it together in a narrative way, but thanks to producer Kevin de la Noy, who kept saying, ‘You’ve been completely profligate’, throughout the whole design process, he actually designed the tanks, the dry tank and the wet tank, so he played his part too.”

Clay, who said that “Master and Commander” was an inspiration for the Battle of the Esophagus, had his team build a full-scale version of Corlys’ ship, “The Queen That Never Was,” and placed it in a dry tank on a gimbal, and then they moved part of it to a wet tank on another gimbal. “We were throwing water at all these guys all the time, and the ship was going up and down, and in both directions, and then we did it all again with [Sharako’s ship] “The Bitchfist,” said Clay. ‘It was a dangerous environment. The floor was slippery and blood everywhere.”

Toussaint said of the preparations for the fight sequence, which was directed by Loni Peristere: “Initially, Loni called all of us, long before we started shooting anything, to talk us through all the models and the photos, and also to discuss the emotional journey that each of us goes through in this fight. Then there was the stunt choreography, which was… I don’t know how many weeks that was, but a lot of it, that we went over and over again. And then, when you get to the beautiful set, which is a lot smaller than the gym we were training in, with water all over the deck, the deck moves up and down, and they had some dead bodies there for us to jump over, and when we did the training battles, of course we all had tracksuits on, I had all these beautiful sexy moves, and once I got the armor on I couldn’t do any of them.

Thorn added: “As soon as I got the contract for Season 3, I started going to the gym. I gained about 20-30 pounds. [22-33 pounds] between seasons, so I think the ‘Bitchfist’ has to have a chest press on it in the hold, and then it was sword fighting and boxing training with the stunt team, and the stunt team have all doubled as superheroes in the past, so the people who trained us to fight were Captain America, Thor, Deadpool, and Wonder Woman.

Salim said of the armor: “It was a lot, like it was definitely something. I mean, you have three people to help you put these things on, so that might give you an idea of how cumbersome they are, and the helmet was ridiculous, because every now and then you’d be waving at something and the helmet would go over your eyes, and then all of a sudden you’d be waving and looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, but I think it helped sell the madness and the kind of chaos that I think it really helped the fear and the kind of instinct and selling the primal energy that you get when you’re in a fight, because that was a really big lesson for me.

“I remember the first day we were filming with the stunt team, and it was the first collision, and when Loni, the director, called action, and we all collided with each other – remember, we rehearsed for months and tried to prepare for this in our minds – the energy was almost like a mosh pit, and it was scary, because everyone became… it wasn’t about taking sides, it was about surviving, and you could feel that. I remember swiping at someone on my own side, and it was crazy, but that’s what was really cool and magical about it.

About Season 3 in general, Condal said, “The season has a sense of relentlessness. The events set in motion at the end of Season 2 turn over the boulder that starts rolling down the hill, and there’s a sense of inexorability. I think at certain points in the story up to here it felt like, ‘Oh, maybe we can pull this all out of the abyss, and maybe there’s a chance.’ The reasonable, responsible adults in the story see that Armageddon is a possibility for one of the endings of this, but I think in this season it just feels like it starts moving at speed and never stops.

“This is the biggest season we’ve done by a huge margin. I just mean the number of days of shooting, the number of locations we’re in, the amount of construction work that Jim and his crew have done.”

Speaking about the issue of leadership in the series and the flawed nature of those who seek to lead, Condal said: “One of the big themes in this season is, ‘What does the throne make you? What does the throne do to you when you’re close to it? And it’s something that has always interested me in this world.’