One of the most compelling aspects of House of the Dragon is its immersive set design, which transports viewers into the world of Westeros. That said, the Iron Throne room is vastly different from how it looked in Game of Thrones. In a new video that takes fans inside the Season 3 set, production designer Jim Clay revealed how one clever trick helped him fulfil showrunner Ryan Condal’s request while also keeping the room’s design practical.
- Ryan Condal wanted statues in the Iron Throne room.
- Production designer Jim Clay integrated the statues into the columns.
- House of the Dragon showrunners deliberately made the Iron Throne room different.
House of the Dragon production designer on how they fixed the Iron Throne room
In a new video for Architectural Digest, Emma D’Arcy takes fans inside the set of House of the Dragon Season 3. During the “Rhaenyra’s Room” segment of the video, production designer Jim Clay spoke of the one big change Condal wanted for the throne room.
Clay said, “One of the briefs I had from Ryan was that he wanted to introduce statues into the throne room of previous kings and those had to be arranged in a corridor in a column so that they were constantly looking down on the person who was occupying the throne.”
Explaining how they added this detail, he continued, “We always ended up with this sort of forest of columns and that was starting to interrupt the sort of shots we wanted to take. So, I had this idea that we would combine the statues with the columns.” Since the statues were also part of the structural column, they symbolised the history and legend of the Red Keep.
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House of the Dragon showrunners once explained why the throne room is different from Game of Thrones
In a 2022 interview with EW, showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik discussed the design of the Iron Throne and the throne room. Of the latter, Sapochnik said, “The throne room was one of the most challenging things to build because it had to be different but it had to be the same. We were trying to figure out a way to tell the story of why there had not been any statues in the old show.”
Condal explained that there were no statues in the throne room in Game of Thrones because the creators did not want it to feel dated. They also lacked the resources. Narratively speaking, the showrunners insisted that the sacking of King’s Landing, which caused extensive damage, led to the throne room taking on its form in Game of Thrones.
