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They didn’t bring trailers or plot hints for season three, but House of the Dragon actors Matt Smith, Tom Glynn-Carney and Fabian Frankel dished a little on their co-stars from HBO‘s prequel to Game of Thrones during a panel on Sunday at New York Comic Con, and Glynn-Carney made a confession that drew gasps and laughter from a hall filled with a few thousand fantasy movie and television fans: “I haven’t seen Lord of the Rings.”
Glynn-Carney’s big reveal doubled as a bailout for Smith, who moments earlier disclosed that he’s never watched one of the foundational Star Wars trilogy movies, Return of the Jedi. “Don’t hate me,” Smith jokingly pleaded.
On Comic Con’s last day, the actors playing HOTD‘s Daemon Targaryen (Smith), Aegon II Targaryen (Glynn-Carney) and Criston Cole (Frankel) sat with panel moderator and Happy Sad Confused podcaster Josh Horowitz for a behind-the-scenes look back on Season 2 of the show adapted from author George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, which finished airing in August. Smith — the blonde-locked Targaryen fighter on screen — showed up in the braided mohawk he’s sporting as an old-school punk rocker in Darren Aronofsky’s ’90s-set thriller Caught Stealing, which is filming in New York City’s East Village.
That was the only period hairstyle seen on stage during a casual one-hour chat about the GOT spin-off that covered suffocating wigs and armor, stagehands wielding leaf-blowers to simulate airflow while riding a dragon, the challenges of speaking High Valyrian, and just how furious co-star Rhys Ifans was about his too-tiny battle helmet during one shoot. “He looked so miserable,” Frankel recalled.
The trio cringed in unison when the discussion took an R-rated turn in some anatomical detail towards Glynn Carney’s Aegon, now irreparably maimed below the waist by dragon fire. Frankel, noting the presence of kids in the audience, said, “Thank you for having us.”
As part of a show known for complex, expensive location shoots and long lead times — Seasons 1 and 2 premiered nearly two years apart — Smith said he’s “not heard hide nor hair” about what’s in store for Season 3. Frankel allowed that he’s “heard some things that I couldn’t possibly share here.” The show is also famous for keeping its scripts under wraps, although Frankel said that once, in a conversation, he let drop that “Paddy’s dead!” — meaning Paddy Considine’s character from season one, King Viserys.
Smith said his years of work playing Doctor Who had left him “pretty well sort of trained” to stay mum about plot details before they emerge on air.
For all the joshing, the actors spoke earnestly about working on one of HBO’s flagship series. “We’re so lucky on the show that we’re surrounded by people who are at the top of their game in every single department,” Glynn-Carney said. “We get to benefit from all of that.”
They also acknowledged the intense fandom for the two television shows based on Martin’s fantasy world set in the kingdom of Westeros. Frankel told Smith that here at New York Comic Con he’d already seen Smith’s face tattooed on a woman’s leg. “I actually know her,” Smith replied. “I met her a few years ago.”
“I’ve seen things that my eyes can never take back,” Smith said.
Glynn-Carney said that despite never seeing Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, he did meet one of its stars on Saturday at Comic Con: Andy Serkis. “And I was like, ‘Oh my god it’s [expletive] Gollum!'” Glynn-Carney said, describing him as “the loveliest man in the world” and adding through some jeers from his cast-mates, “I have no right to be excited.”
Season 2 of House of the Dragon ended this summer with more clamor offscreen than on, as HBO found itself responding to blogged — and later deleted — criticisms from Martin, whose novel Fire & Blood provides the source material.
“Commonly, when adapting a book for the screen, with its own format and limitations, the showrunner ultimately is required to make difficult choices about the characters and stories the audience will follow,” HBO said in a statement defending showrunner Ryan Condal. “We believe that Ryan Condal and his team have done an extraordinary job and the millions of fans the series has amassed over the first two seasons will continue to enjoy it.”
Condal, for his part, said that Martin’s tome is a “history book” that doesn’t necessarily come with fully fleshed-out moments or characters.
Smith, meanwhile, took aim at trigger warnings for potentially sensitive or upsetting content preceding episodes, lamenting “too much policing of stories.”
Saturday Night Live even got a dig in, with a sketch in the new season, ‘Blonde Dragon People‘, poking fun at the prestige drama for testing its fans’ patience with shorter seasons, longer shooting schedule in between, similar-sounding character names and continuity errors.
The show itself concluded Season 2 on a quieter note, dramatically speaking, than usual for Game of Thrones and its offspring, a choice attributed to the prequel having two fewer episodes than Season 1 as part of a long-term plan for HBO’s second medievalist fantasy saga based on Martin’s works. The shortened season meant putting off until Season 3 the Battle of the Gullet, a bloody showdown in Fire & Blood between the Greens, the faction backing Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) and Glynn-Carney’s Aegon II Targaryen, and the Blacks, the faction backing Rhaenyra (Emmy D’Arcy) and Smith’s Daemon, for control of the Westeros throne.
The show’s creators have confirmed that HOTD will conclude with a fourth season. HBO is also moving ahead with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a drama set in Westeros in the years between House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones.
Season 2 fell short of Season 1’s overall viewership. But the series recouped audience as it went along, drawing more viewers for the finale than the premiere, and Martin also blogged praise and encouragement for the show along with the occasional gripes.
