Ahead of the second series of House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones, its stars have told the BBC what to expect.
Based on George RR Martin’s epic fantasy novel A Song of Ice and Fire, House of the Dragon stars a collection of British talent, including Matt Smith, Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke.
The second season of the HBO prequel picks up just days after the final events of the first season.
While there is the promise of more monumental battles and fiery dragon encounters, the new series features a number of difficult situations, with characters dealing with heartbreak and revenge following previous events.
The second season sees Westeros on the brink of a bloody civil war as the Green and Black Councils fight over King Aegon and Queen Rhaenyra, respectively.
The final climatic events of the first season saw a number of changes to the characters’ motivations in this next episode.
D’Arcy, who plays Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, told BBC News that playing both a grieving mother and a powerful ruler presented many obstacles, but that they welcomed the opportunity.
“You don’t have a choice,” D’Arcy said. “You have to have great endurance. It’s a marathon.
“You arrive with color in your cheeks, and love and joy in your heart. But I love the epic nature of filming six days a week, for 15 hours a day, for six months.”
Cooke, who plays Queen Alicent Hightower, called the season “really difficult.”
“It’s about coming to terms with grief and trauma, and how do you play it and sustain it over a seven-month shoot, playing out all the complexities that are there?” she says.
“She (Alicent) had all this power and has now become the Dowager Queen. She’s trying to understand, in this context of guilt and shame: who is she if she can’t rule from the shadows?”
In House of the Dragon, the franchise’s central power struggle leads to characters doing heinous things in order to claim the throne – something loyal fans love.
When asked if they thought their characters were terrible people, or good people who have terrible things done to them, D’Arcy replied: “I think they’re all people trying to survive in a Pretty terrible system.
“This system can cause these characters to do some pretty horrible things.
“What I love about Game of Thrones is that you have such a complex and exciting and varied constellation of characters, and you want to see them, to see these collisions happen.”
Two characters fans will be eager to see back on screens are the mercurial Daemon Targaryen, played by Smith, and the villainous Aemond Targaryen, played by Ewan Mitchell.
Speaking on the water-logged red carpet at the rainy UK premiere of season 2, Smith said: “We’re diving back into the troubled world of the Targaryens and there’s a lot of grief going around, and that makes people act strange, it makes people vulnerable, it makes people crazy.”
‘Wild Ride’
Smith’s demon will face a struggle for power while caring for his now broken family.
“He’s falling into a mythical place of discomfort. He’s going to have a bit of a crazy adventure this year,” Smith said.
When asked what it was like to play such an evil character, Mitchell said it was “horrible”, explaining: “I don’t like playing evil.
“As a character, Aemond has this facade, a shield of armor that he has crafted over many years to hide his insecurities.”
But he added: “As an actor, it’s so enjoyable to play a character like Aemond and really delve into his multi-faceted complexities.”
House of the Dragon was one of the few American productions that continued filming during last year’s Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes.
For nearly three months in 2023, writers and industry stakeholders walked away from the debate over fair wages and the use of artificial intelligence in the industry.
But House of the Dragon actors did not participate because the series was mainly filmed in the UK under contracts overseen by the British union Equity, rather than its American counterpart, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) .
Series writer Ryan Condal told the BBC it was a “difficult time” but a “great privilege” to keep the cast and crew employed.
“There have been a lot of labor disputes,” he said. “We were lucky that all of our scripts were finished and we were already in production when the writers’ strike broke out.
“What I was happy about was keeping our team of 2,500 people working. It was a very difficult time, and a lot of people went through very difficult times, so just the fact that our team was able to continue to work was a real privilege.”
Olivia Cooke said the strike period was “strange”.
“It was weird. It was shaky,” she said.
“A lot of us are members of SAG, but we were under a different union. We kind of had to keep working or we’d all get sued.
“We didn’t feel good, but we also knew that we were really lucky to keep filming because a lot of the cast and crew were really counting on this job. It was really multifaceted and strange.”
So far, early reviews for season two have been solid.
Empire rated the season four stars, saying the series “remains a prickly and acidic human drama; an astute, timely and well-realized study of how power and wisdom are so often mutually exclusive.”
The Telegraph also gave it four stars, writing: “House of the Dragon has everything you could need for a good time.” »
Movie review site Roger Ebert called the latest series “gripping”, but added that convoluted writing led to a slow start “for better, and sometimes for worse”.
The second season of House of the Dragon will be available in the United States from June 16 and in the United Kingdom from June 17.