Co-creator, writer, and executive producer Ryan Condal takes on sole showrunner duties with the much-anticipated second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon. Season one ended with Queen Alicent snatching the crown from the rightful heir, Princess Rhaenyra, following the death of King Viserys Targaryen. Alicent conspired with her father, Ser Otto Hightower (Hand of the King), and the small council to name Aegon ruler of the Seven Kingdoms before Rhaenyra learned of the death of her beloved father.
Season two finds the Seven Kingdoms on the verge of what promises to be an incredibly bloody civil war. Once best friends, Rhaenyra (Team Black) and Alicent (Team Green) are now powerful opposing forces in the battle for the Iron Throne.
House of the Dragon season two premieres on June 16, 2024, with new episodes airing on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. HBO hosted a press conference in support of the new season, which was divided into three parts: Ryan Condal alone and then Condal with Team Green, followed by Condal with Team Black. The following are key takeaways from Condal’s portion of the press conference.
House of the Dragon Season 2 Ryan Condal Press Conference Highlights
Confirming season two’s new dragon count:
Ryan Condal: “I think I promised five and I think it’s still correct. I said five a year and a half ago and I think I’m sticking to it, so five new ones that you haven’t seen before, I think…”
On season one’s finale setting the stage for the scope of season two:
Ryan Condal: “Well, that was the place that, going back now five years, we always wanted to end the first season with because we felt like that was the proper moment that sort of catalyzed everything else that followed. But really, the question was how do you build up to that moment and have it not only land as a moment of spectacle and shock and all that, but something truly rooted in the many years-long character dynamics that we’ve been setting up since Rhaenyra and Alicent were children? And we felt like if we did that and then that moment would land with the impact that I think it did, then we’d be off to the races.
And then at that point, people are invested. I think that’s my hope is that that’s where we are right now. [Season two] picks up a couple days later and off we go to the next horrible tragedy.”
On the loss of so many characters in season one influencing writing season two:
Ryan Condal: “I mean, it’s a point of no return in a way. I mean, there are multiple points of no return it feels like in this show because everything … it’s one of these kinds of entrenched conflicts. So, you have these two sides that share a lot of common history that hate each other, and the hatred only gets worse as things go on and the tragedies pile up. And it felt like Vhagar killing Luke was–that’s a big sea change in the way things are going to be looked at. And then what are they going to? What’s the counterpunch? What’s the counter-response to that?
And, again, we just wanted to set all that stuff up so that you know all of the characters and understand where they’re coming from, and what makes them weak and strong and what they want and what they love, and then throw them into the mix and see how they respond.”
Creating the balance between larger-than-life dragons and stunt work and vulnerable human emotions:
Ryan Condal: “I mean that’s the trick of the job. It’s television, ultimately, so you’re telling these big stories that are often at an intimate scale. I think the things that I’m proudest of in the show are often two characters in a room in conflict with one another because you’re making the shows 8 episodes, which amounts to probably about nine hours of television all end to end. You can’t fill it all with dragons fighting each other. You have to have these kind of stage stories. And those are the things that I think people engage with most are the character levels. So that when the spectacle comes, if you’ve done your job right, you care about the characters involved with the spectacle and that’s why you take up this really emotional experience out of it.”
On not just recreating the magic but finding new ways to elevate the story:
Ryan Condal: “We sort of run from one thing to the other in this show, so it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, there was a first season. It wasn’t just all one thing that ran into itself.’ No, I mean, I’ve said my anxiety in season one […] was is anybody going to watch the show? And because you’re following The Beatles, the most successful television show of all time, how do you follow that? You don’t. You just try to make something good that stands on its own.
I think that was the challenge in season one, and I think there are less nerves going into season two. But now we also have to kind of outdo ourselves, because that’s the expectation set before us.”
On Author George R.R. Martin’s involvement in season two:
Ryan Condal: “Well, look, I mean, he wrote the book, so in that way, he’s always with us. But yeah, he’s very busy [there] working in this massive universe. They want to make many more shows about this world. He’s definitely aware of what’s going on. I do keep in contact with him. But I think now that we’re kind of off to the races with the show and we’ve done a good job about rendering Fire and Blood into dramatic form, that I think we’re operating on our own now, in a good way. But George always looms large in the background of House of the Dragon.”
On the continuing appeal of the fantasy world created by George R.R. Martin:
Ryan Condal: “They’re just incredibly well-crafted stories and characters. It always goes back to the characters for me with that world. And I think if you were to move slightly beyond that, I would just say that the world is so textural and well-realized that it feels real. Even reading Fire and Blood, which again, is a fake history book … which is George’s words, not mine … it’s an in-world history written about this, which could be very dry but it’s incredibly engaging because it’s so textural.
I think because it’s … this is no secret, but Fire and Blood, or this story, this particular story is based on the Anarchy, which is a famous and very bloody conflict that happened in English Medieval history. I think those little touchpoints that connect to real history make it feel real versus coming into a world that’s entirely fantastical and entirely made up from whole cloth. It does feel like it actually happened in a lot of ways, particularly to me who lives it every day.
But I mean, I don’t know. I think that’s it. And that helps inform all of the sets and the banners and the costumes.”
Challenges faced by Alicent Hightower in season two following Aegon crowned King:
Ryan Condal: “I think Alicent gets put through the wringer this year and is really forced to kind of come to reckon with the fact that the thing that she was sort of groomed to do since she was 14 years old, by her father, which is to lift up the greatness of her own house, she’s done that and now she’s had a son who’s a king. [She] put him on the throne and, in doing so, has diminished her own power. Because the minute Aegon wears the crown, Alicent’s power as queen is reduced, because she’s no longer the queen of the Seven Kingdoms. She’s now the dowager queen, the queen that used to be.
I think she probably didn’t realize in the moment how much of a, even though it’s a subtle thing, power shift that is. And I think very much this season, so much of what Alicent experiences is reckoning with this thing that she was sort of made to do her entire life, did it, accomplished it, and then how it’s landed on her and what that means.”
Structuring season two without any time jumps:
Ryan Condal: “I mean, it was a great challenge in structuring season one just because of that. And really, it was less the sort of figuring out the time jumps, as they’ve been come to be called. It’s like how do you cover 20 years of story and history in 10 episodes of a brand-new television show and expect everybody to follow it?
I think in season one, really, up until the very end, the episodes sort of happen in these discrete timelines. So, the traditional tools that we rely on as storytellers where you have a cliffhanger at the end of episode two and then you pick up in episode three, you could do a little bit of that. But because they were happening in these, again, discrete time zones, it was harder to lean on that. So, these stories had to be kind of complete as formed.
And now in season two it’s very much … I think this is traditional serialized storytelling where it’s all happening in real-time, and we kind of move from episode to episode. And it’s exciting because it’s a way of keeping momentum moving and building excitement and all those things.
There were challenges definitely to season two, but I think season one was a particular narrative pretzel that I did. And I don’t know that we need to do that again.”
On the challenges of adapting such a complex, overarching story:
Ryan Condal: “I think there’s nothing unique necessarily about this show versus other shows that are multi-point-of-view. It’s just there are so many wonderful characters in the show, all of which have their own three-dimensional, four-dimensional, five-dimensional stories. It’s how do you keep the narrative moving forward, tell character stories within, and service everybody in a way that feels deeply rich and realized, and have them cross and interact with each other, sometimes when they’re not literally crossing and interacting.
And something I’m particularly proud of this season that we found in the sort of post-production process is, as everybody knows, Alicent and Rhaenyra are – even though they spent much of season one together, they’re now apart. They’re literally on different islands and they don’t interact with each other. But in the editing, we found ways to connect those characters. If you see Alicent going through something particularly deep and emotional and you cut to Rhaenyra, there is a kind of filmmaking connection there. And I don’t know, I think that it’s the dimensionality of the story and just trying to keep all those plates spinning with a cast of fantastic actors from top to bottom. You want to give them all the screen time they deserve.”
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The post ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2: Ryan Condal on Dragons and George R.R. Martin’s Fantasy World appeared first on ShowbizJunkies.
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