While the first season of House of the Dragon has been wildly successful, and generally critically acclaimed, some have struggled with the time-jumps and the re-casting of most of the central characters. Some audience members have said that it’s been hard to connect to characters when a new actor is introduced and they’re quickly killed off.
Showrunner Ryan Condal is aware that it was asking a lot of the audience to go with the big time-shifts that occurred every three episodes or so in the first season. He says that he cited The Crown a lot in the writers room, but with The Crown, each set of actors had two seasons – not just a few episodes.
However, he has promised that the time jumps and re-casting is now over, and there will be none in the second season. Speaking to Deadline, Condal says; “I will say, as a reward to our wonderful audience for following us through all the time jumps and recasts, they are done. We tell the story in real time from here forward.”
Condal concludes; “The actors are playing these characters until the end. We’re not recasting anybody. We’re not making any huge jumps forward in time. We are now in the Dance of the Dragons, and we’re gonna tell that story.”
Speaking of the decision to re-cast, Condal says; “It did scare the hell outta me. It scared the hell out of HBO, too. But to their credit, I mean it’s really the best network in the world. They were bold and said ‘we’re HBO, we’re buying into this and we’re gonna do this.’ I’m incredibly grateful to them for it. But yeah, it scared the hell outta me. No one else has really done it before.”
“I mean, the closest analogue that I have is The Crown, one of my favorite dramas of the last 20 years. I’ve talked about The Crown more in our room than I did about most other shows other than the original Game of Thrones. They did it incredibly successfully. It was the proof that we could do it on a more accelerated timeline because it was so successful. They went from Claire Foy and Matt Smith to Tobias Menzies and Olivia Coleman. You accepted that they were the same characters.”
“The different thing is those are historical characters and you know who they are. But it was proof to me that if the drama was compelling enough and the story was compelling enough, that people would stay and follow the characters and not the actors. And sure enough, that’s what they did.”
Check out everything we know about season two of House of the Dragon so far.