While it hasn't been officially announced by HBO, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal has today confirmed that Season 3 will be the Game of Thrones prequel's penultimate season. As expected, the plan is for the series to end with season 4.
Condal revealed that during a new Entertainment Weekly cover story (via SFFGazette.com), saying, "I can't speak for everybody else involved with the show and HBO and all that, but, yes, that is very much my plan."
It's no secret that the showrunner clashed with author George R.R. Martin while developing the series, as their visions for this era of Westerosi history didn't align. Despite previously saying that he hoped to rediscover his and GRRM's "harmony," when Condal was pushed for an update on their relationship, he bluntly replied, "I have nothing to add."
While the sometimes meandering Season 2 drew mixed reviews from fans after a much stronger first batch of episodes, Season 3 opens with a bang by adapting the Battle of the Gullet. The hugely violent sea battle is, as Condal describes it, "arguably the craziest episode of television ever made."
Calling it a "four-year quest" to make the episode, the House of the Dragon showrunner explained, "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."
For Queen Rhaenyra actor Emma D'Arcy, that means, "The series this time around starts at 60 miles an hour. 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," D'Arcy teased.
Based on George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood, the series, set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, tells the story of House Targaryen.
Returning cast members for season 3 include Matt Smith, Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Steve Toussaint, Rhys Ifans, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno, Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall, Matthew Needham, Tom Bennett, Kieran Bew, Kurt Egyiawan, Freddie Fox, Clinton Liberty, Gayle Rankin, and Abubakar Salim.
New additions include Tommy Flanagan as Lord Roderick Dustin, Dan Fogler as Ser Torrhen Manderly, and James Norton as Ormund Hightower.
House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres on HBO on June 21. Check out some newly released stills from the series below.