How ‘House of the Dragon’s Best Bad Boys Are Prepping for Season 2
Me @ HotD season 2: Come at once. Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never needed you before. I love you.
If there’s one thing that 2022 has given me, it’s a a rekindled obsession with everything A Song of Ice and Fire—and especially with my favorite family of pyromaniac, washed-out, and generally not-so-great rulers. After the devastating disappointment that was the end of Game of Thrones, I’ve finally been reminded that I am indeed a Targaryen stan first and a human second, and also that I am not going to apologize for it.
In light of all this, you can imagine the kind of terrible House of the Dragon—now a fresh Best Drama Golden Globe winner!—withdrawals I’ve been experiencing ever since the first season finale aired last October. Let’s just say that I haven’t left a single Tumblr tag or Archive of Our Own page or Twitter fan-cam unexplored. And I’m not even going to start to describe the state of my TikTok likes—which, as user @gingerinabottle brilliantly put it, have by now become “the Aemond catalogue.”
Needless to say, I’m looking forward to 2024 and House of the Dragon season 2 like I’m a starving woman and the new episodes are a freshly plated dish of my favorite meal—which is risotto, in case you’re wondering. As a poster child for Annoying Book Readers™ everywhere, I know more or less what’s coming for us, not that it’s hard to imagine—more family drama tearing a whole kingdom apart, more gruesome and bloody deaths, more dragon battles.
Still, even with all my Fire and Blood knowledge, every scrap of information we’re getting about the pre-production of season 2—like how Ewan “beloved murderous baby girl Aemond Targaryen” Mitchell told The Face magazine that he’s had a buzzcut because they’re all currently doing their wig-fittings—has me absolutely screaming-crying-shaking and thinking of booking a plane to Spain to be there when they finally start shooting King’s Landing scenes this spring. I mean, I do live in Italy. What’s a three-hour flight, right?
But most of all, I loved hearing from Tom Glynn-Carney—recently crowned King by the greens as Aegon II Targaryen—about how the cast is busy bulking up ahead of principal photography.
Some season 2 previews
Tom Glynn-Carney recently appeared at the Game of Thrones Fan Convention, the first officially sanctioned event of its kind held in December with a considerable panel of stars from Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. There, Glynn-Carney teased some info about what his character and the rest of his family of the messiest bitches in Westeros will be up to—or as much as he could, at least, considering the usual airlock-tight security that shrouds everything related to the TV adaptations of George R.R. Martin’s works.
“All I can tell you is that we’re training very hard and we are making sure our bodies are in good enough condition for how strenuous season 2 is gonna be,” said Glynn-Carney, as reported by Entertainment Weekly, after a fan asked him whether we’re going to see Aegon riding his dragon Sunfyre in upcoming episodes.
And, I mean, it does make sense—with Aemond and Grannie Vhagar chomping down on poor babies Lucerys and Arrax in the season 1 finale, we all know that the Dance of the Dragons is going to turn into an all-out war very soon. And that means major battle scenes (this is the only thing I’m going to say for book readers, but you know Rook’s Nest is coming somewhat soon-ish), heavy armor and weapons, stunts, and all that jazz. There are no words to describe the heights my hopes are soaring at now.
I also particularly loved the way Glynn-Carney spoke about Aegon, a pretty bad person but a fascinating character who fits right into his unhinged but oh-so-compelling family. “He was always gonna be a tricky one because, on paper, he can very easily come across as an out-and-out villain, and someone who’s dark and cold. I think he is all those things, but I think there’s way more layers to him, as well,” he said, once again reported by Entertainment Weekly. “He’s not an out-and-out psychopath. There are complexities and intricacies within him that make him an absolute gift to play. He keeps me guessing, so hopefully that translates to keep everyone else on their toes”.
It’s similar to what Ewan Mitchell said about Aemond in that same interview with The Face—the only one he has given since the show premiered and the episodes in which he appears as adult Aemond were available for everyone to see and obsess over. “The whole get-up: the long hair, the eye-patch, everything that means and represents, is a tragedy that Aemond wears as well as his Targaryen blacks. It’s one thing to become a dangerous and proficient swordsman, but to do it with one eye? He’s a whole other monster,” Mitchell said of the Aemond look.
He then continued with a parallel pretty much tailor-made to crush my heart: “Aemond was always on the back foot. He’s able to identify with this dragon Vhagar, the oldest, grumpiest, biggest dragon. […] She’s so big she can’t fit within the confines of any castle wall, like Aemond. He doesn’t fit in anywhere, and so he identifies with her”.
Gotta love actors who love their characters.
So as we wait for more updates about how House of the Dragon season 2 is shaping up, let’s all laugh at this amazing little bit between Tom Glynn-Carney and the lovely Jack Gleeson, who played the not-so-lovely Joffrey Lannister Baratheon in Game of Thrones, which happened right on the stage of the Game of Thrones Fan Convention. “I don’t know man, it’s just been on my mind a lot. It’s this whole thing that I’m a product of incest,” says a very sad-acting Jack Gleeson. “Yeah, that sucks,” says Tom Glynn-Carney, with the poker face of someone playing a person whose family tree, to quote a very famous tweet, is basically a circle.
(featured image: HBO)
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