EXCLUSIVE: Ryan Condal is busy promoting Season 3 of House of the Dragon but Season 4, which he has confirmed is where he will draw things to a close in Westeros, is starting to take shape.
Condal told Deadline that Season 4 of the hit Game of Thrones spin-off will “be on a pretty similar cadence to what we’ve done” with the previous three in terms of number of episodes, but “the ambition” for the series he is currently writing is “massive.”
“It will be the biggest season we have made, for sure,” added Condal, as he spoke with Deadline before a keynote at the Enders Leaders Conference in London.
Condal hasn’t quite had time to reflect on his time showrunning one of the biggest HBO shows of all time, but he knows the time for reflection will come and is currently focused on writing Season 4.
“I’m an ‘all good things come to an end’ type person,” he explained. “I don’t know what I will feel yet [when it finishes] because right now the show is almost like a snake eating its tail, very rarely are you doing one thing. Right now, we’re crafting Season 4 before we’ve even finished Season 3 and released it to the world.”
He may be bringing his time on House of the Dragon to an end but Condal certainly isn’t done with HBO. Last month, Deadline exclusively revealed that Condal had re-upped his deal with the premium network through 2029.
Today, he said the re-up was done “to kind of establish the beginning of the next chapter, whatever that happens to be.”
While he didn’t reveal much about what he is working on for the future, he possibly put to bed the idea that he is working on future Game of Thrones spin-offs.
“Anything is possible but I think I have said what I have to say about Westeros,” added Condal.
Season 3 is “belly of the beast”
He is in London with cast promoting House of the Dragon Season 3, which he said had been a season where “everything sort of slowed down” in terms of production. “Things had settled in and I knew the rhythms of production,” he explained. “I really enjoy making things [in the UK] in general,” he added of the nation where he has lived for the past six years.
While the tone in Season 3 remains “relatively consistent,” he said it feels “very much the midpoint, the belly of the beast, the point of no return.”
“There is no turning back,” he added. “With that comes a gravity, a tension, a darkness. Maybe earlier we saw more signs of hope that things wouldn’t get worse, but now I think there is this feeling of the snowball running down the hill, a sense of inevitability.”
Episode 1, which launches June 21 and will feature the iconic Battle of the Gullet, has previously been described by Condal as “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made.”
While he stressed today that “I’m not here to review my own episode,” he pointed to the sheer scale and size of ep 1, for which the team built two tanks and three unique ship sets, all building towards a 25-minute setpiece battle. “The ambition of doing that for a single hour of television for me does push it into that category arguably of being the craziest thing ever attempted on television. I am very proud of what we pulled off.”
House of the Dragon follows the points of view of 19 characters, a huge undertaking, and Condal said Season 3 will see some different ones come to the fore, including Aemond Targaryen, Helaena Targaryen and Alyn of Hull.
Main characters Rhaenyra Targaryen, Alicent Hightower and Daemon Targaryen, played by Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke and Matt Smith respectively, will remain “very present,” Condal added.
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