Later this month, HBO will bring audiences into the House of the Dragon. The show takes people back to the Westeros world Game of Thrones made famous, and for those acting in it, preparation included actual serious conversations on fictional dragons.
Alicent Hightower actress Emily Carey reveals the background work in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly. Essentially, showrunners Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal sat the cast down and walked through how to act by these beasts.
“I remember in rehearsal; we sat down and had a conversation about how one would interact with a dragon. We had this whole in-depth thing about living in a world with dragons… It’s something that, even as an actor, I hadn’t thought about. But especially coming from the original show, you see these characters interacting with dragons in a very different way. It was such an interesting topic of conversation. We genuinely spent at least an hour talking as a group.”
The report also reveals some planning has been done for future seasons. Other revelations include creatives on the project having to fill in blanks from George R.R. Martin’s source material, and Sapochnik says they created the idea dragons die due to their sizes.
“One of the most interesting things, for me, was trying to figure out dragon sizes and dragon anthropology. What we came up with is dragons never stop growing. At some point in their prime, they’re this fully formed incredible beast, and then they start to get, essentially, cancer. Bits of them break off, they start to become flaky, and they become so big that they break their legs when they land and that’s what kills them. What kills them is their own weight.”
House of the Dragon premieres Aug. 21.