House of the Dragon co-creator Ryan Condal knows not all fans will like his choices

HBO 'House of the Dragon' showrunner on set of his 'Game of Thrones' prequel series.

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the House of the Dragon season finale.

Ryan Condal played out his own Ted Lasso fantasy, thanks to House of the Dragon. The American transplant (New Jersey born) now living in the U.K. recently found himself walking the pitch at the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in Northern London. The current chairman, Daniel Levy, heard Condal was a Spurs fan and extended an invitation to the grounds for an interview as his guest. An added perk of the visit was access to the field and the VIP suite. "It's all because of this silly show," Condal says, modestly, of House of the Dragon, which he co-created with George R.R. Martin. "I guess the club is a big fan of Game of Thrones, so they wanted to make it happen."

Condal just returned home from that experience, still visibly aglow, when he Zooms with EW on the night the House of the Dragon season finale is set to air on HBO back in the States. He admits the visit was a nice bonus for making the first Game of Thrones successor, but most important to him is keeping the promise he made to Martin, whom he's known since first striking up a friendship in 2013. "I was going to render a faithful adaptation of his books and make a series that I would wanna see as a fan," Condal says. "And I feel like I've done that."

The ratings would agree. After breaking a record for HBO with the most-viewed series premiere episode of any show on the Home Box Office network, House of the Dragon closed out its first season with the biggest finale since the days of its predecessor. According to HBO, 9.3 million viewers tuned in to watch the dramatic conclusion to the fantasy drama's first 10-episode chapter of the Dance of the Dragons, a civil war that erupts within the Targaryen empire hundreds of years before the events of Game of Thrones.

There's clearly an audience ready to reinvest in the world of Westeros, but the series hasn't gone without its critics. While the source material, Fire and Blood, is written as a historical record based on various (potentially unreliable) narrators, the show presents itself as the objective telling of events, leading to certain changes that some have decried on social media. "Yeah, please explain to me and George who Daemon is as a character, everybody," Condal says with a laugh, referencing the feedback he's seen over the portrayal of battle-thirsty Prince Daemon Targaryen, played on screen by Matt Smith. Condal made an active attempt to remain in this zen bubble he created for himself. He left social media after Colony, the previous three-season sci-fi show he made for USA Network. He doesn't want to be colored by viewer response, good or bad. Still, he is very much aware of the fanbase.

"I've done a lot of work, hopefully successful work, to try to show them that I am one of them," he says. "I come to this show as a massive, longtime fan of the books: I read the books multiple times, I've listened to all the audio books, I've now read Fire and Blood probably more times than any volume of the Song of Ice and Fire, I communicate with George regularly. I am as in it as you can be. I am still going to make choices that not all of you are going to like, but, on the whole, I am really looking after the sanctity and wellbeing of George's work. I care about it immensely as both a fan and as the steward and the showrunner. As long as I can lay my head on the pillow at night knowing that I have brought that kind of love and fidelity to his work, then I feel like I've done my job."

Dreaming of dragons

HBO Ryan Condal

Condal first contacted Martin as a fan of Game of Thrones in 2013. He was making a pilot for NBC, his first foray in television. Condal looks back on it as his version of film school. The pilot was for a serialized adaptation of the comic book series The Sixth Gun — a supernatural Western about six evil guns that bestow unique abilities to their owners — with fellow producer Carlton Cuse.

"I really wanted to do 'Edgar Wright does Tarantino,'" Condal recalls of that concept. "I wanted Edgar Wright to direct the pilot. It's essentially Lord of the Rings with guns, but there's a real poppy, kind of Mike Mignola, Edgar Wright tone to it. It's a little tongue in cheek. It's a little bit of a send up of a Western. The main character is a bit of a Han Solo type. He can't believe that he got dragged into yet another mess. But there's also really dark elements to it, and it's kind of this gothic horror thing."

It seems Westeros was already on his mind, if only in the subconscious. Michiel Huisman, who would go on to play Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones, was set in the lead of this pilot as Drake Sinclair, the Han Solo type; Graham McTavish, who Condal would cast years later as Ser Harold Westerling in House of the Dragon, was cast as Silas Hedgepeth; and Pedro Pascal, the future "Red Viper" Oberyn Martell, was playing Special Agent Ortega. Condal may have had a little something to do with Pascal's rise to fame in the Thrones-verse, even if the producer won't admit it.

Condal and Martin formed a friendship after the then-fledging TV writer asked to take the author to dinner as a fan of his work. Their correspondences continued and Martin even visited the set of The Sixth Gun. "Three months later, [Pascal] called me and he's like, 'I'm reading for the Red Viper. I need to take you out to lunch. You have to tell me everything you know about the character,'" Condal recalls. "And I sat down and I was like, 'OK, here we go.' I got my sketch pad. 'He's the Boba Fett of Game of Thrones.' I guess he was a fan of the show but had not yet read the books. And then a few months later, he just texted me, 'I'm in wushu spear training in Belfast' — or wherever he was. I was like, 'This is insane. It's amazing.' Then he was 'Pedro Pascal' from that point forward."

Condal, too, was moving on to bigger things. The Sixth Gun did not move forward to series. He suspects NBC didn't have the resources or "the taste" to pull off his vision of a "really loud, almost like rock and roll Western that was technical and bright and bold, but also bloody with really scary monsters." Condal immediately went back to Carlton to find something else to work on together. What came next was a detailed pitch for a World War II allegory. Instead of Nazis, there were aliens. This was Colony. In another fated happening, Josh Holloway, who was pursued for The Sixth Gun but turned it down because it'd been too soon after the end of LOST, became the star of this USA sci-fi drama.

If The Sixth Gun was his film school, Colony made Condal a producer. "I really learned how to think at once like a creative person but also as the money person that has to make all of this happen: the order that things happen in, casting a show, working with production designers and costume designers and speaking their language. But also, every show has a limited pool of resources," he says. "Even House of Dragon has a limited pool of resources. It's a giant Olympic-size swimming pool, but you have to figure out how to best take those resources and put them up on the screen and not waste a dollar in terms of anything that you spend. It's a thing that you can only learn by doing it."

More so than on The Sixth Gun, Condal learned how a script page is translated to the screen. It was also a fast-moving, ever-evolving show. "I think with Colony, we really didn't have time," he notes. The writers were penning new scripts as they were shooting and often, as Condal mentions, "writing back toward the money you had." It's a muscle he now values on House of the Dragon. "You have to solve a problem and you have to solve it on one of the sets that you already have with the actors that you have," he says. "You can't suddenly just get on a plane and go to Portugal because you have this new idea."

The House that Condal built

HBO Ryan Condal discusses a scene with Prince Daemon Targaryen actor Matt Smith on the set of 'House of the Dragon.'

Colony went off the air in 2018, but it wasn't long before Condal had his next project lined up — and this time, it was his dream project. It's a story that Condal has told multiple times now in talking about how House of the Dragon came to be. Ahead of Game of Thrones' record-breaking series finale in May of 2019, Martin, who was working with HBO to develop multiple franchise spin-offs, turned to Condal. "George was like, 'I'm trying to do all these spin-off series. There's one that I really care about in particular and it's the story of the Dance of the Dragons,'" Condal recalls. Set hundreds of years before the events of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books, the Dance of the Dragons focuses on the battle between Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and her half-brother Prince Aegon II Targaryen over the Iron Throne. Martin hadn't given Fire and Blood, his upcoming new book chronicling the rich history of House Targaryen, to Condal at this point, but Condal knew about the Dance from what characters mentioned in the Game of Thrones show and novels.

"It was fairly ordained in terms of what George was giving me," Condal remembers. "It was this specific period in history. This is the thing that he wanted to cover. As soon as I heard it, I said, 'Of course! This is the spin-off that should be made.' Coming off of that epic original series that David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] did, being able to then tell the story of the beginnings of how the Targaryens lost their power, essentially, was the next place to go if you're telling a prequel that's thematically tied to the themes of the flagship series. So it just made sense for me."

The only thing Condal and Martin debated was where to start the story. The events leading up to and during the Dance take place over the course of years — decades even. Martin wanted to begin years before the Great Council of Harrenhal, a scene that we now see as a brief preface to the House of the Dragon premiere episode. HBO, Condal says, was more eager to get to the action. "I said, 'Well, I think there's a happy medium in between where we do have an elegant first act to introduce all the players in this massive, very complex chessboard, get a lot of the early infighting, but also tell the story of this Greek tragedy, this family that tears itself apart from within."

Condal fairly recently went back to read the outline he drew up for the pilot episode after Martin knighted him as co-creator. "It very much is the pilot that we made," he adds. Martin has been included in the process ever since. Condal will write something, send it to Martin, and the two will talk. They have an understanding that's similar to how Condal views the fandom: "There are things that we're going to do in this show that you [George] are not going to love or get right out of the box." That said, "I'm always going to listen and I'm always gonna put this material in front of you and we're always gonna have a talk about it."

A good example is the Daemon discourse, which fans have been discussing at length on social media. The Rogue Prince, as he's called, is shown choking his wife, now Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy), in the season finale, a scene many of which have argued goes against the character that's been presented on the series thus far.

HBO Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) and his dragon Caraxes never make idle threats.

Condal has a matter of fact response when asked about the likability of Daemon and viewers wanting to root for him: "Well, I mean... he killed his wife." That would be when Daemon bashed Lady Rhea Royce to death with a rock. "We've seen Daemon do very questionable things all season long, but he's being played incredibly by an actor who's exuding charisma," Condal says of Smith. "He's fun and fascinating and dangerous the way these great Game of Thrones characters are, like Bronn [Jerome Flynn] and Jamie [Nikolaj Coster-Waldau] and the Red Viper [Pascal]. We're really drawn to those characters as an audience, but that doesn't mean that they are unimpeachable heroes that are not capable of doing really questionable things."

That seems to be Condal's guiding light for all of House of the Dragon. "Your loyalties for certain characters and for certain sides and for certain arguments will shift and change over the course of this. That's the nature of this thing," he explains. "It's incredibly messy and complex and gray, and it's one family fighting each other. This is not Starks vs. Lannisters. This is an extended family doing battle with one another. So it's harder to find those entrenched sides."

Condal is now the sole showrunner of House of the Dragon as he's currently preparing season 2, which was renewed following the show's premiere episode. Miguel Sapochnik, the veteran director behind some of the most celebrated Game of Thrones episodes who shaped the Targaryen prequel as co-showrunner with Condal, is stepping back from his duties. As of now, he will only be involved as an executive producer moving forward and Alan Taylor, another Thrones vet, is stepping up as executive producer and director. But Condal's mission remains the same.

Martin wrote in an entry on his Not a Blog website, "It is going to take four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish." Condal clarifies they never got to that level of specificity in their conversations. "I ultimately don't know yet how much time we need to tell the story because the Dance of the Dragons is a very long and very specific episode in the Targaryen dynasty," he explains. "But the thing is, from the point where we leave off this season, we have 150 years of history still of Targaryens in power. So I think the question with this story is more: Where do you let the curtain fall?"

Season 2, once he cracks it, will help determine "how much runway is ahead" for the Dance. Then it becomes about where House of the Dragon goes from there. Condal and Sapochnik both spoke about the potential to turn the prequel into an anthology series that chronicles different eras of Targaryen history. After the Dance, he could theoretically go back to the Doom of Old Valyria and Aegon's conquering of Westeros. He could also continue sequentially to the days of the Mad King and Robert Baratheon's Rebellion that left a young Daenerys Targaryen fleeing to Pentos. Condal agrees there are seasons upon seasons of material that could be spun out of those stories.

"That to me is the real promise of Fire and Blood. It's such a rich history," Condal comments. "I, as an author, writer, fan, want to tell a whole bunch of stories now that it's not just the Dance of the Dragons, but the things that preceded to the things that led to it. What happens 50 years after when they're still in power, but they don't have any dragons left? I think those are the interesting things to me, and I think that's the thing that keeps this fresh and alive, because there's a lot of other themes to be explored within the different facets of the Targaryen dynasty."

And if Condal gets to visit more Premiere League soccer clubs along the way, so be it.

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