Can we keep making “Winter is coming” jokes when the next Game of Thrones series is about the Targaryens? More Westeros adventures are coming, at any rate: House of the Dragon, the first GoT spinoff to speed toward production, has found its king. Paddy Considine (The Outsider) is on board to star as King Viserys I.
If Considine’s name sounds familiar, it may be because he’s been a frequent character-actor presence for years, turning up in two-thirds of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Girl With All the Gifts, and Peaky Blinders. Recently, he played a major role on The Outsider, the show based on Stephen King’s book of the same name.
The character description shared by Entertainment Weekly makes it sound like this Viserys has little in common with the later Viserys we came to know and loathe in Game of Thrones: “King Viserys Targaryen is chosen by the lords of Westeros to succeed the Old King, Jaehaerys Targaryen, at the Great Council at Harrenhal. A warm, kind, and decent man, Viserys only wishes to carry forward his grandfather’s legacy. But good men do not necessarily make for great kings.”
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Based on Considine’s age, it’s probably safe to guess that House of the Dragon skips Viserys I’s relatively peaceful early years (and, alas, his years as a dragonrider) to get straight to the “Year of the Red Spring,” so named because of its many deaths. A decade after the Red Spring, Viserys’s children wind up in a civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons.
House of the Dragon was announced last year as a 10-episode series co-created by George R.R. Martin and Ryan Condal (Colony). Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, who directed six episodes of Game of Thrones (including “Battle of the Bastards”) are co-showrunners for the series, which is set 300 years before Game of Thrones and based on Martin’s book of fictional history, Fire & Blood.
In a blog post last fall, Martin said that House of the Dragon, “was actually the first concept I pitched to HBO when we started talking about a successor show, way back in the summer of 2016.” He also emphasized that he would not be writing for the show: “I am not taking on any scripts until I have finished and delivered WINDS OF WINTER. Winter is still coming, and WINDS remains my priority, as much as I’d love to write an episodes of HOUSE.”
HBO opted not to move forward with the Game of Thrones spinoff that had been expected to star Naomi Watts.
