How “House of the Dragon” made season 2 during the Hollywood strikes: 'It was rough'

"They understood that if we left the set, they were going to make it without us."

The House of the Dragon team were forced to weather a global pandemic during the making of season 1. And for season 2, they faced more unenviable circumstances: industry-wide strikes.

In May 2023, prior to the start of filming the highly anticipated next chapter of the Game of Thrones prequel, the members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike for fair wages and workplace protections. Soon after, the Screen Actors Guild did the same, causing a months-long standstill in the industry.

House of the Dragon, however, was in a unique situation. The series shoots abroad, with London's Leavesden Studios serving as their primary base of operations. The production is also under contract with Equity, the U.K.-based actors union that wasn't on strike during this time. So showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal, as well as his lead writing partner Sara Hess, found themselves in a tricky place.

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"It was rough. It felt real s--tty, I'm not going to lie," Hess tells Entertainment Weekly for our Summer TV Preview cover story. "We talked to the WGA and, ultimately, they understood that if we left the set, they were going to make it without us. I don't think the WGA loved it, but they were okay with us being there in a producing capacity."

"We were prepared for it," Condal says. "The writing really was done. The writing is always done on the show because it has to be. You cannot prep a show that is this complex [otherwise]. We're shooting two feature-size film units every day. That's the way that we keep on schedule to release the show every two years, otherwise it would take a year just to film the show."

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Putting that further into perspective, Condal reveals he and Hess are already deep into writing season 3 in the event HBO renews House of the Dragon for more episodes. "That's why we spend a year writing in advance," he adds. "We had to accelerate the polish schedule, where you take aboard all the actor feedback as they come on, production feedback as directors come on. Usually we go through a very methodical process of taking those things one layer at a time, but knowing that [the strike] was coming, we compressed probably two months of polishing into a month. That was probably the most stress it caused at the outset."

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Hess remembers the scripts were done by January 2023. The following month, they were doing full cast read-throughs of every single episode. "The directors rehearsed a lot of the big scenes in advance," she recalls. "We did rewrites after doing the cast read-throughs, so we got a lot of preparation done." She clarifies they would've done this regardless of a strike. "It wasn't like we stuck it in under the wire and were freaking out about it," Hess adds. "We felt really good about what we had already. So when the strike happened, we definitely were pencils down. We never changed a word, and we told the cast far in advance, 'If you have any qualms, get it out now because on the day, it's not going to happen.'"

The typical writing process continues to evolve all the way through filming as tweaks are made here and there. The WGA strike, however, made that impossible. "It was very strange making a show for five months where we identified things as we went along and we said, 'We'll just deal with that later,'" Condal says. "But thankfully, we had very polished scripts."

Hess traveled back and forth between London and the States quite a bit and says the disparate environments were "super weird." "I was on the picket line [in Los Angeles], and then I go back [to London] and we're allowed to work as producers. It didn't feel great," she says. "The SAG strike was also a rough one because a lot of our actors are SAG and they felt real solidarity. They were tortured over their decision of what to do."

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Because of the show's Equity contract, SAG-AFTRA ultimately urged the stars to fulfill their obligations. "We had this very, very surreal experience of everything was in flames and everyone was breaking down, and over in England it was just kind of normal," Hess says. "We were living our normal lives."

Should HBO green light House of the Dragon for season 3 in the coming months, which seems likely at this point, Condal has one wish: "That there's not another once-in-a-generation event looming over the show, and that we can just happily make a season without external influences slowing us down."

House of the Dragon season 2 premieres June 16 on HBO and Max.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.