War has come to Westeros in House of the Dragon, and the first battle in the skies and on the seas that we’ve seen in the Game of Thrones universe is on the horizon in the Season 3 premiere on June 21. The stars of House of the Dragon tease the action ahead in the show’s adaptation of the Battle of the Gullet from George R.R. Martin‘s Fire & Blood in our video interview above. They say that fans will be “happy” with how the battle scenes play out.
The Battle of the Gullet is the deadliest naval battle in the history of Westeros. Fire & Blood describes it as pure chaos and carnage, and the stars of the HBO series say that’s the same in their version. Steve Toussaint (Corlys Velaryon), Abubakar Salim (Alyn of Hull), Bethany Antonia (Baela Targaryen), and Harry Collett (Jacaerys Velaryon) teased the Season 3 premiere in TV Insider’s studio at the 2026 ATX TV Festival.
“I think people can be excited to see the route that it’s gonna go down,” says Antonia. “I think that people are gonna be very happy.”
“The one thing that is the constant is the chaos of it,” adds Salim. “The actual brutality of it is something that is very much highlighted in this battle. That’s something that we will see in its entirety with this.”
Salim says it was like being on a theme park ride filming the fight scenes on the ships, which were actual functional boats floating in two massive tanks. As House of the Dragon co-creator Ryan Condal told TV Insider, “Two different tanks had to be constructed (a wet tank and a dry tank), as well as gimbals to move the ships so they would feel like they were floating on the sea.”
“Two different interactive ship sets built in the same tank, operating on separate, independent gimbals,” Condal added. “Production built these beautiful, photo-real medieval galleys and then beat the absolute hell out of them. No one has practically produced anything like this before. You won’t believe it until you watch the wonderful behind-the-scenes documentary The House that Dragons Built.”
The episode set a new world record, as well. As revealed at the show’s SXSW London panel on June 5, 23 stunt performers were ignited in one take.
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Salim and Toussaint spent most of their time filming this battle on the ships. Antonia and Collett, however, were on their dragons, so their scenes were primarily filmed on a Volume set away from the rest of the actors and stunt performers. Director Loni Peristere had to set the scene for them so their energy in the “air” matched the destruction below.
“It’s one of those ones as well where I don’t think we would ever experience something like this in our careers,” Salim says. It’s “once in a lifetime,” Collett adds. Antonia and Toussaint agree.
“Everyone really felt that,” says Salim. “That’s why all that energy was there to make something really epic and really cool. It was crazy.”
Nothing will be the same after the dust settles on this battle.
“It changes a lot, full stop,” Collett says. As Condal told us, “This is by far our most action-packed season. The Gullet is huge… but it is only the beginning.”
The four stars agree that the episode highlights the pointlessness of war and the cost of it, how it changes people. Salim thinks it’s “really rare to see, in any form of media, especially within fantasy, the costs of war on the psyche. It really is going to change a hell of a lot.”
HBO
Toussaint says it’s good that Season 2 avoided conflict as much as possible, even if it meant that the season was less action-packed than fans would have wanted.
“I’ve never, thankfully, been in a war, but that’s kind of how I imagined it to be. Especially for Episode 1, I’m so glad that Season 2, the bulk of Season 2, was about trying to avoid war. Because anybody who has been in this world who has been to war knows that it’s something that you want to avoid,” Toussaint says. “Sometimes you hear from the old servicemen now, there’s this phrase, ‘In war, the only winner is war itself.’ I felt that reading these scripts. This is not something that’s fun for these people. It’s not an adventure. You’re literally just trying to survive.”
Collett says there’s a realistically human element to the plot this season.
“As much as this show is filled with fantasy, there’s parts of it, which I love, that feels very real, which is nice,” Collett says. “It isn’t all just about dragons.”
Learn more about the Season 3 premiere in the full video interview above.
House of the Dragon, Season 3 Premiere, Sunday, June 21, 9/8c, HBO, Streaming on HBO Max