House of the Dragon season 3 just raised the temperature at SXSW London. During an hour-long panel diving into the imminent third season, behind-the-scenes footage and a previously unreleased clip from the opening episode were shown, teasing the much-anticipated Battle of the Gullet.
The footage, according to showrunner and HotD co-creator Ryan Condal, was from the "early moments" of the sequence, and featured Lord Corlys (Steve Toussaint) and his illegitimate son, Alyn (Abubakar Salim), on the deck of the Queen Who Never Was, before hell is unleashed. "This sequence, I will confidently say, is unlike anything ever been done on television before," Condal claimed, after noting that the idea of bringing the Battle of the Gullet to screen had been "haunting" him and production designer Jim Clay for "the better part" of four years. "Certainly the amount of construction that you guys did for just for one episode is kind of crazy and frankly irresponsible, but it was necessary to tell the story."
One of the bloodiest battles in all of Westeros history, the Battle of the Gullet is a major inflection point in the Dance of the Dragons, aka the civil war between Team Green and Team Black. "Even within the bloody, awful history of the Dance of the Dragons," Condal said. "The Gullet stands out even to those historians as one of the worst things that happened in that history. We had to dramatize it, we had to show it." Only recently, Condal described the multi-terrain battle as "arguably the craziest episode of television ever made."
Alongside Toussaint and Salim, also in attendance were several cast members who have a fateful part to play in the Gullet: Harry Collett (Prince Jacaerys), Jefferson Hall (Ser Tyland Lannister) and Abigail Thorn (Sharako Lohar). "That first clash, the energy was almost like a mosh pit, and it was frightening," Salim recalled. "Because it wasn't about picking sides, it was about surviving, and you could feel that."
Four ship sets, two massive tanks (one dry, one wet), and 3 million liters of water were used to bring the bloody battle to the screen – an enormous undertaking for a single episode of television. "We needed to do three straight hours of just chamber drama to be able to pay for the first episode," quipped Condal. Unlike most Thrones season openers, which tend to slowly and methodically set the stage for the fireworks to come, The Battle of the Gullet gets season 3 off to an explosive start that will hardly let up all season.
"Really, the season does have a feeling of relentlessness to it," Condal said. "There is a feeling that this episode in particular, the event set in motion at the end of season two, does flick the boulder that starts to roll down the hill, and there is the sense of inexorability. At points in the story up to here, it felt like, 'Oh, maybe we can claw this all back from the abyss, maybe there is a chance.' The reasonable, responsible adults in the story… seeing that armageddon is a possibility for one of the endpoints of this. But this season feels like it just starts moving at speed and never stops. And look, it's going to have a lot of the rhythms of previous seasons of the show. But this is the biggest season we have made by a huge margin."
House of the Dragon season 3 premieres on HBO Max on June 21 in the US and June 22 in the UK. For more, see our list of the best shows on HBO Max, or keep up with other upcoming TV shows heading your way.
