‘It Gets Quite Apocalyptic Very Quickly’

On set for the battle that marks the beginning of the end for House of the Dragon.

From a distance, the dusty Mediterranean village on the back lot of the Warner Bros. set in the London suburb of Leavesden looks more likely to serve as backdrop to a Condé Nast Traveller photo shoot than the site of a pivotal battle in the Game of Thrones universe. Winding alleys house artisan workshops and squat homes crammed with prop cooking utensils, and down one street stands a sept that resembles a Romanesque church. But on a muddy Tuesday flecked with rain, as the House of the Dragon crew sets to work filming their season-three finale, the signs of a brutal battle that will set the bustling village of Tumbleton ablaze are impossible to ignore. “This is very much a place that was in the wrong crosshairs at the wrong time,” showrunner Ryan Condal tells me. He compares Tumbleton’s fate to cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the targets of nuclear weaponry in World War II. “They have these weapons of mass destruction flying around, and this is the season where you really start to feel that. That’ll take us through to the end: It gets quite biblical, quite apocalyptic, very quickly.”

The Battle of Tumbleton makes for an ignoble end to Green general Lord Ormund Hightower (James Norton, a standout newcomer to the cast), who spent the season shoring up his defenses in Tumbleton while plotting to install his ward, Prince Daeron Targaryen, on the throne (in between ranting about the Targaryens and sniffing his favorite perfumes). Ormund fights dirty: He refuses to broker peace (though Ser Gwayne Hightower tries without his consent), he recruits children to stand in as part of his army to bait Daemon Targaryen into an attack, and, most brutally, he has turned Tom Bennett’s dragonriding bastard Ulf against the Blacks. That strategy, however, turns out to be a pyrrhic one: Ulf, being woken from a drunken stupor, does indeed get on his dragon, Silverwing, and set the armies of the Blacks aflame, but, in a moment of equal-opportunity arson, he turns on the Greens, too. Meanwhile, Roddy the Ruin (Tommy Flanagan), the berserker-esque leader of the Black-aligned Northern faction the Winter Wolves, fights his way into the town and faces off against Ormund on the battlements. Ormund slices off Roddy’s arm, but the Northerner powers through and knifes him up the backside. Just when you think Roddy might be the one to off Ormund, however, Ulf flies in on Silverwing and announces, “Fuck you, too,” as he lights up both Ormund and Roddy.

“There’s an iconic moment in the book where Roddy’s arm has been taken off and he keeps fighting, and we know Ormund died in the Battle of Tumbleton. How do we blend all that together?” Condal says of drafting the episode. “It’s a fun way to take out these two great single-season characters in the same beat, and to have Ormund live just long enough to see that dragon he got to turn against Rhaenyra turn back against him — just before he flash-fries in the pan.” 

To Condal, the battle provided an opportunity to thread together many of the thematic ideas that haunted his version of Game of Thrones lore from the start. Condal liked the idea that, in Ormund’s death, we see the character bested both by an embodiment of the old world of Westeros — “even though Roddy’s not a Stark, he’s a Northerner, which is very old-school Game of Thrones” — and by the dragon that represents the side of Daeron he’s never quite been able to control. “Storytelling doesn’t always deliver you really satisfying, layered things like that,” Condal says. Non-book readers may be surprised to see a major character offed so soon after his introduction, though that kind of twist is both classic GoT and something Condal notes made it easy to cast an actor of Norton’s caliber: “We knew the best way to get a name and presence like him was to make a single-season pitch,” he says. “You get to play a whole arc from beginning to end. You get to leave a memorable mark on House of the Dragon, and then you get to go on and do other things.”

Beyond Ormund, the episode is meant to give a sense of the wanton destruction wreaked upon innocent civilians in the midst of war. The House of the Dragon crew built their version of the village from the bottom up, adding barricades and scorch marks to their construction as the action intensified. (Sometimes, they would also have to take them off: “We do not shoot in order,” Condal says, “so a street is burned, and then it’s not burned.”) The show’s production designer, Jim Clay, modeled the basic look for Tumbleton, which lies in the Reach south of King’s Landing, after a medieval market village. “The brief was that the equivalent of Tumbleton would be a provincial town in France before the Nazis took over,” Clay says while giving me a tour of the set, though his inspiration tilted a little more southward — you’ll notice a few olive trees scattered around the village. Clay toured Portugal and Southern Italy for inspiration and took to the idea of incorporating the conical roofs of trullo houses in the region of Puglia into Tumbleton. The scenes outside the city walls, in which Daemon plots with his lieutenants and the Black armies attack the city, were filmed in Surrey in Southern England, but the production knew they couldn’t use an actual village for an extended location shoot. “The reality is that we have to destroy this place twice,” Clay said. (In Fire & Blood, there is a second Battle of Tumbleton to come.) “And medieval towns are usually World Heritage sites, so it’s just not feasible.”

On the wooden battlements of Tumbleton — designed to look like they were jury-rigged by Ormund’s army — the episode’s director, Andrij Parekh, is going through footage where Roddy’s crew breaks through the town’s defensive walls. “A scene with two actors is a lot different than a scene with two actors and 200 extras who can definitely draw your attention away,” he says. “The background work has to be as good as if you’re staying with the main cast.” To prep for the episode, Parekh analyzed battle scenes in films like Saving Private Ryan and Spartacus as well as from the original run of Game of Thrones. Much of his work today, he says, involves making sure the scenes shot on the battlefield on location (and on a sunnier day that the one currently experienced in Leavesden) will be able to stitch together seamlessly with the ones shooting on the lot. “This is my first time as a director shooting a battle sequence,” Parekh says. “I’ve done it as a cinematographer, but it’s been quite an education.” For the scene he’s about to shoot, Ormund heads up to the battlements to see Silverwing burning the armies of the Blacks. The inferno that follows, as the betrayer’s dragon sets fire to both armies and then Tumbleton itself, will be rendered with both practical flames and CGI. The day before this one, Parekh filmed takes of fire leaping down the street, which include practical flames created by piping gas under the set. “It’s terrifying,” he says, “and I was marveling at the camera operators who don’t flinch at all.”

In prep for the battle sequence, VFX supervisor Dadi Einarsson and his team created a digital model of the city that helps the director plot out ways to connect shots between sequences, give basic renderings of where the dragons may fly to provide references for actors’ eyelines (in some cases, they even programmed a drone to fly above the battle), and storyboard the destruction that follows. Off of those practical flames, the VFX enhances shots with computer-generated dragon fire. Once the shots are in, Einarsson estimates it takes about three months on average to fully bake a shot with effects. “And that’s with a lot of prep beforehand,” he says. “On our show, we very seldom try to figure out a sequence from scratch in post. The reason we’re able to get pretty high quality within a tight schedule is because so much prep work has gone into it. Fix it in prep — that’s a good motto.” 

Part of that prep includes the scattering of limbs and bodies, which are made by House of the Dragon’s very busy prosthetics team headed up by designer Waldo Mason. In a two-story warehouse on the back lot, just a few blocks away from the streets of Tumbleton, Mason gives me a tour of his prosthetics operation, which is currently abuzz with workers assembling gruesome wounds and other injuries. “We’ve just done some dead children, and more burnt ones will come later,” he says. At one point he holds up a silicone bust of Ormund’s face, printed from a 3-D scan of Norton — head and neck printed separately and then pieced together. That’s just one of the many familiar and unfamiliar faces that Mason has on hand. The crew has, he estimates, around 20 articulated dummies that they use to play dead bodies, and they create new heads to place upon them, with different costumes, hairdos, and beards depending on the needs of the scene. At this point, he says they’ve scanned about 50 different heads as references, mostly using members of the prosthetics team and crew as references, though he adds that he’s hoping to get House of the Dragon’s writers as models for the show’s next season. “I’m going to get Ryan’s head at some point,” Mason insists. “We’ve got to get the top-tier producers for our big finale.”