Burn, baby, burn: “House of the Dragon” embraces ‘all-out war’ in season 3 (exclusive)

When it comes to the specific circumstances that trapped three of the key House of the Dragon stars in New York City in late February, a very obvious Game of Thrones reference comes to mind.

On paper, the conditions for Entertainment Weekly‘s season 3 cover shoot felt achievable. Emma D’Arcy, our reigning Rhaenyra Targaryen, was already staying in Chelsea while performing in Off Broadway’s modern Antigone adaptation, The Other Place (with a fellow Thrones alum, Tobias Menzies, no less).

Tom Glynn-Carney — playing Rhaenyra’s adversarial half brother Aegon II — was also free on a days-long break in between performances of the London-based production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, with Bryan Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

That just left flying in Ewan Mitchell, Aemond “One-Eye” himself, to complete the trifecta of top contenders competing for the Iron Throne.

Then, winter came.

A day before the shoot, a blizzard — nicknamed Winter Storm Hernando by the Weather Channel — swept across the Northeast. By Monday morning, most neighborhoods in Manhattan experienced more than 20 inches of snowfall. Public transportation and car traffic were severely limited, if not banned altogether. Flights were grounded. Somehow, despite the insurmountable odds, when crosstown travel wasn’t even a guarantee, the shoot commenced.

“Seeing New York in that atmosphere with the snow, it was Home Alone 2, you know?” Mitchell remarks when speaking to EW the following May. “It was just so cinematic.”

The proverbial winter on House of the Dragon is far less “ice” and way more “fire” as the Dance of the Dragons — the succession-sparked Targaryen civil war that’s fated to cripple the empire and decimate the number of dragons in Westeros — rockets toward the endgame.

There hasn’t yet been a firm declaration from HBO as of yet, but Ryan Condal, series co-creator and showrunner, reaffirms that season 4 is the end.

“I can’t speak for everybody else involved with the show and HBO and all that, but, yes, that is very much my plan,” he says.

Which makes this summer’s season 3 (premiering June 21) the penultimate.

“It’s all-out war,” Mitchell remarks of the new episodes. “It’s just a blitz straight out of the gate.”

That alone will likely be music to the ears of the Game of Thrones fanbase, which collectively had a lot to say, both good and bad, about the sophomore run in 2024. Even George R. R. Martin, the author and architect of this entire fantasy universe, got in on the discourse.

Season 3 will arrive months after Martin, also a credited co-creator of House of the Dragon, made disparaging remarks in a January interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his working relationship with Condal and how the TV drama adapts the events of his book.

Prior to that interview’s publication, Condal addressed their falling out, telling EW he “made every effort to include George in the adaptation process,” but “at some point, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way.” He added, “I just have to keep marching forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that’s my job… I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday.”

When asked for comment now, Condal says, “I have nothing to add.”

Regardless of any book-to-screen opinions, which Condal acknowledges “comes with the territory,” viewers seem overwhelmingly invested with House of the Dragon, powered by what he calls “towering, staggering work” from D’Arcy and the cast. The first two seasons make it the most-watched current series on HBO Max, and he remains an executive producer on the other Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The Home Box Office network continues to invest in Condal, having extended their exclusive television deal with him through 2029.

That investment is evident in the season 3 premiere, which brings us the Battle of the Gullet, one of the most violent sea battles in the history of this fantasy world — and, from an execution standpoint, “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made,” Condal describes.

The scarring aftermath of this moment will carry both the Greens (supporters of King Aegon’s claim to the Iron Throne) and the Blacks (supporters of Queen Rhaenyra) through to the inevitable conclusion.

“The series this time around starts at 60 miles an hour,” D’Arcy says. “We’re finally watching a war that has been building for two seasons…. I’m so impressed by Ryan and the team, because it’s to really hold your nerve to stage a conflict that has been, until now, primarily interpersonal, interfamily — and then [to] finally, in one huge gesture, allow that conflict to unleash on the realm as a whole, I think is some very classy plotting.”

Water wars

Deep into the U.K.’s Leavesden Studios, about a 15-minute walk inward for most of the crew, lies the Queen Who Never Was, the same black ship that Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) was building in season 2. The massive vessel — carrying the Sea Snake himself, his bastard son/first mate Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim), and a crew of armored Velaryon navy men — features a figurehead on the bow in the likeness of Corly’ late wife, Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best).

Surrounded by blue screen on a breezy summer Saturday afternoon in May 2025, she rests on two giant gimbals programmed to simulate the bobbing of the ocean. This is the “dry set” for the Battle of the Gullet, which Condal calls the midpoint of the Dance of the Dragons. In the coming weeks, they will shoot on “the wet set,” involving fabricated ships floating in a massive tank, pumped with 1,000 liters of water a minute. But on this day, Salim, Toussaint, and the background players simulate the chaos of this moment.

Swarms of arrows remain planted in the portside, while giant fans pump in fog and water canons blast the Velaryons. The simulation of currents is so realistic that some, including the cinematographer, reported seasickness.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m on a theme park ride,'” Salim recalls of that day. “I don’t even know how to begin to [describe] the euphoria that hit when I was on that set,” he adds. “It was like I was living my kiddish dreams come true of sailing the seas with a sword.”

The battle begins when the Triarchy fleet, led by Admiral Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn), arrives to break the Velaryons’ blockade of the Gullet, the crucial trade passage held by Rhaenyra’s forces since early in the war. At the helm of her signature ship, called “the Bitchfist,” Sharako is “the tempest, the whirlwind” at the center of the onslaught, Thorn prefaces. There’s bad blood between her and Corlys, which is motivating her far more than any pact with the Greens.

“She’s Captain Ahab in this episode,” Thorn says. “She’s on a quest for her white whale, and she’s gonna kill [Corlys] no matter what happens.”

The battle is one of both sea and sky when dragons enter the fray. Days after that Saturday set visit, the team plans to bring in a robotic arm wielding a flamethrower to depict about a dozen soldiers set aflame on deck. Series stars Bethany Antonia (Lady Baela Targaryen) and Harry Collett (Prince Jacaerys Velaryon), two of the chief dragonriders of the Gullet, spent most of their time on this episode shooting on the studio’s mechanical buck on the Volume stage, surrounded by LED lights and wind machines.

Collett remembers director Loni Peristere shouting at him over a megaphone.

“They want you to feel hectic because you have all of these arrows flying and these boats burning and things exploding,” he says.

For Condal, it’s been “a four-year quest” to make this episode, dating back to before season 2. He was determined to realize the Gullet on screen, but didn’t know in those early days whether it was producible, even with the show’s expansive budget.

“To try to tell this story without doing the Gullet would be trying to film Lord of the Rings without doing the Battle of Helm’s Deep. If we were gonna do it, we had to do it right. And that meant dragons and ships and multiple theaters of conflict.”

Rhaenyra isn’t on the battlefield for the Gullet, but D’Arcy asked to see dailies during their spare moments.

“There was a degree of thrill at what was on the page this season because the show’s gotten bigger,” D’Arcy comments, “not just in terms of its dramatic scale, but actually in terms of its ambition. It’s very exciting when that happens. It felt to me that the bar had been raised — and I’m a competitive person, so I wanted to meet that.”

Heavy lies the crown

These days, D’Arcy gets their aerial kicks without Gullets or dragons. Speaking to EW earlier this month, the actor Zooms in from Lexington, Texas — “proper ranch country,” as D’Arcy calls it — where they are shooting an indie film called Parachute from writer/director Annie Silverstein (Bull). Set on a Texas drop zone, it’s a story about how military veterans use skydiving to treat PTSD and chronic pain.

“I’ve jumped three times and, unfortunately, can confirm it’s amazing,” D’Arcy says. “I don’t know what we do with the knowledge that jumping out of an airplane is really amazing. If I lived out here, I have no doubt that I would be working towards my solo license, but I have a terrible track record for injury.”

It’s a stark shift from the self-described “pious life” D’Arcy lived while performing on stage in The Other Place — as they put it, “There’s something quite monkish, actually, about doing a play” — and the same goes for House of the Dragon. When they are shooting the HBO drama, D’Arcy describes themself as more “aged.”

“I had 94 days this season, which doesn’t sound like that many, but I promise it is quite a lot,” they say. “Once I’m about two months in, I feel that I’m aging faster than time. It’s definitely not pious.”

Glynn-Carney feels a similar vibe shift between the stage and screen. “Disciplined” is how the Aegon actor describes himself in theater mode. When asked to describe his state of being shooting House of the Dragon, one word comes to mind: “Manic.”

The same can be said of both their characters as the titular game of the TV franchise changes.

Condal says, “There is the reality before the Gullet and the reality after the Gullet.”

Out of a closed-door meeting with Dowager-Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), Rhaenyra is convinced she can take King’s Landing and capture her usurper brother, though she doesn’t know Aegon has already absconded to places unknown with Larys Strong (Matthew Needham). And in his absence, Aemond has his one good eye on the throne, determined to take matters into his own hands.

There are also new players on the chessboard. On Team Green, there’s the introduction of Lord Ormund Hightower (James Norton), head of House Hightower and cousin to Alicent. On Team Black, there’s the Winter Wolves, a 2,000-man army of savage northerners led by Ser Roderick Dustin. Tommy Flanagan (Sons of Anarchy) plays the man described by Martin in Fire & Blood as “so old and hoary men called him Roddy the Ruin.”

“He’s this old, ferocious warrior. They couldn’t kill him in battle, and all he wants to do is die this glorious death,” Flanagan says. “It’s just this whole one note: My mission is just to kill, destroy, save the queen, save the kingdoms.”

As violence in the realm ticks up, the three actors behind the remaining contenders for the crown voice a common goal. Their characters may become much more morally complex than perhaps we’ve seen thus far, but D’Arcy, Glynn-Carney, and Mitchell seek to mine the humanity of their roles, even if (and when) they take darker turns.

“I feel like it is a horror TV show, but the monsters are the human beings in it,” Mitchell remarks. “It’s not so much the dragons.”

D’Arcy shared a common interest with Condal in exploring “a movement towards tyranny,” they explain, “but in particular making that journey legible.”

There was an opportunity, they note, to watch a character that has been broadly sympathetic take a change.

“I think in Rhaenyra’s case,” D’Arcy adds, “it’s a kind of religious fanaticism, actually, that starts to radicalize her position.”

It’s a reference to the Song of Ice and Fire, the prophecy first divined by Aegon the Conqueror and passed down through the generations of royal successors to Rhaenyra.

“Rhaenyra has primarily been in a reactionary position,” they observe. “She spent a lot of time in season 1 and season 2 backed into a corner, treading water to an extent, trying to preserve a very tenuous position. I have shared with an audience a desire for her to move into a more active, front-footed position. I wanted to see what happens when that character stops having to apologize.”

If done right, viewers will understand — and perhaps sympathize — with that journey. Glynn-Carney is of the same mindset for Aegon. Since the beginning, he never wanted the character to feel like an outright villain, but rather a man with relatable reasons for being. That can sometimes feel easier said than done when it comes to the Targaryen that raped a servant girl in his youth and stole the crown from his father’s chosen heir.

The actor wanted to ensure Aegon “wasn’t just seen as someone who was a problematic young man who was a product of his background and his upbringing and the people that he surrounds himself with,” he says, “but there was a human side to him, as well. There’s a vulnerability and a fragility.”

When Glynn-Carney was first cast, he had a conversation with Condal and then-co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik about Aegon’s entire arc. (Condal has served as the sole showrunner since season 2.) He was warned at the time that it would be a slow burn, but that it would lead to “the crescendo of Aegon’s fate,” he recalls, “and there’d be twists and turns on the way.”

Storywise, the Targaryen king was scarred beyond repair by his brother’s dragon at season 2’s Battle of Rook’s Rest. The actor spent about four months filming those later bedridden episodes with prosthetics, but now he’s in them for the long haul.

That was another detail Condal and Sapochnik were upfront about with Glynn-Carney from the start: “It would be a long time in the chair in the morning and I’d get to know my hair and makeup team very well,” he recalls them saying.

Over his 10 months shooting season 3, Glynn-Carney spent up to three-and-a-half hours each day, sometimes starting as early as 2 a.m., to transform into the burned Aegon, which he considered a welcome improvement from the eight-hour application process his first time in prosthetics. (At least it gave the actor time to watch “the entire catalog of anything Alan Partridge related,” he says of Steve Coogan’s British comedy persona.)

Then you add the heat. “Having all the prosthetics on in the height of summer, outside, in the beating hot sunshine was an interesting experience because it’s peeling off my face.”

Prior to this, Aegon’s scenes had been primarily confined to Leavesden Studios. But since the season 2 finale, the king is now on the road with Larys. Glynn-Carney guesses they shot in roughly 10 different locations across the U.K.

“They come to blows all the time,” Glynn-Carney says of that relationship. “They disagree on everything. They’re like squabbling brothers.”

As for Aegon’s actual brother, there will be fallout inside the Red Keep from the king’s unceremonious leave of absence.

“Aemond is definitely bloodying his sword this season,” Mitchell warns. “I think he’s the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. He’s coming in shock and awe.”

Early trailers for House of the Dragon‘s junior year signaled a Vhagar assault on Harrenhal, with additional scenes of Aemond stalking the ghostly halls in full armor. The one-eyed prince, a spare to the heir, is making moves while the Iron Throne remains vacant. He does so with Mitchell’s signature intensity. Even when he’s idle, Aemond exudes lethality. It’s difficult to anticipate whether he’s going to strike or caress.

“There’s something scary about not showing everything and keeping your cards close to your chest,” Mitchell says. “Aemond is almost this force, an ideal that is relentless. He’s just continually moving, sometimes at the expense of everyone else.”

Mitchell, a true cinephile at heart, references the moment in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) when Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle “deceives you as a viewer” midway through the movie.

“How on earth could I ever think that I understood that character in the first place?” he says. “You barely recognize him.”

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In his eye(s), a similar turning point came for Aemond after putting his brother in the line of Vhagar’s fire the previous season.

In season 3, “I was really looking forward to pulling back that veneer,” he says, “taking him out of that Terminator-esque horror-icon movie and making him more human.”

Mitchell, at the very least, already has a crown, if not the crown Aemond is fighting for. He’s held on to the custom-aged metallic gray headpiece created for his EW cover shoot. It currently rests on his windowsill back in Kentish Town, U.K., where he’s couch surfing at a friend’s before heading home to Darby. Glynn-Carney, however, received a less desirable gift out of New York’s tundra: a canceled flight.

Behind the scenes, the Aegon actor missed a Tuesday performance of All My Sons due to February’s blizzard but made it back to the U.K. for the following night’s show.

“The important ones were Wednesday, because it was being filmed that day,” Glynn-Carney says, “so I couldn’t have missed that one.”

In hindsight, it all makes for a good story to tell on the forthcoming press tour for House of the Dragon season 3.

“It really was character building,” he adds, “but I’m glad we did it.”

The characters themselves won’t be so lucky.

——————-

Directed by Kristen Harding + Alison Wild

Photography by Kanya Iwana

Motion – DP: Cory Fraiman-Lott; 1st AC: Shelby Lail; Gaffer: Larry Schuler; Best Electric: Nica Fazio; SLT: Michael Magarahan; Key Grip: Dominic Ciofalo; Best Grip: Mace Vannoni; Grip: Charlie Hernandez 

Production Design – Production Designer: Ward Robinson/Wooden Ladder; PD Crew: Isaac Arvold, Nick Kozmin, David Mitchael, Bradley Carroll, Fletcher Chancey

Photo – 1st Assistant:  Daniel Johnson; 2nd Assistant: Jimmy Kim; Digital Tech: Ryan Schostak

Wardrobe – Stylist: Altorrin/The Only Agency; Styling Assistant: Madison Wen Gu; Tailor: Roderick Reyes

Post-Production – Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; VFX: Derek Viramontes; Design: Alex Sandoval; Score: Ramin Djawadi

Emma D’Arcy – Hair: Riad Azar/Art Department; Face: Christopher Ardoff/Art Department; (Cover Look): Jacket & Shirt: The Frankie Shop; Pants & Shoes: GmbH; (Header Look) Top, Pants, Shoes: GmbH; Rings: Parts of Four

Tom Glynn-Carney – Grooming: Chelsea Gher using Patricks/Exclusive Artists; (Cover Look) Top: KYLE’LYK; Pants: GmbH; Boots: Thom Solo; Cuff: Parts of Four; (Header Look) Top, Pants, Shoes: GmbH; Rings: Parts of Four

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