House of the Dragon is back and you’d best believe the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is back too! This season we’re recording subscriber-exclusive reviews of the show every week. Join our Patreon and listen to our take on the season premiere!

Was her death a difficult place for you to get to as an actor?
That was one of the scenes I was most proud of. In the script, it’s really only two lines — it says something like “They fight and she’s killed” — and I got to decide how I wanted to play that. The obvious way to play it would have been that she fights to the bitter end and goes down with a sneer of hatred. I decided that in those final moments, she is afraid. I wanted the audience to sympathize with her and to see what this journey of revenge has cost her. The theme of this season is the cost of war, and I wanted to set us up for that.

Something that all the female reporters I’ve spoken to have picked up on is how that scene where she dies is a hard watch, because it’s a much larger man strangling a woman to death. I was never scared of being in physical danger during the battle, but there are moments that are emotionally difficult. I mean, being strangled underwater by a much bigger man is a scary thing. I have been attacked by men, as almost every woman has, and it is a scary thing to go through, even if it is just pretend. The emotions sink into your soul a little bit.

Even though we’ve seen her do all this stuff, there’s something about that which is hard to watch, and I deliberately chose to make that hard for you to watch. Fortunately, Abu is a very professional and kind guy. I remember when we watched it back, Abu said, “They’re gonna think I’m a monster. They’re gonna hate me.” I was like, “I know!”

I interviewed Abigail Thorn about playing Sharako Lohar on House of the Dragon for Vulture.

The battle that results from all this is staggering in scope. What was it like to film it?
I filmed separate to everybody! Steve and Abu Salim, who plays Alyn of Hull — you know, all of the ship lot — they had their thing going on, where everybody was being set on fire. Apparently we broke the world record for most people set on fire in a television show. They did three, four months of stunt preparation. Honestly, it sounds bad. I was having the most fun while shooting this, and it doesn’t come across in the episode whatsoever, which I’m happy about.

I interviewed Harry Collett about playing Jacaerys Velaryon on House of the Dragon for Vulture.

From its opening moments, something is different about this episode of “House of the Dragon.” The composer Ramin Djawadi adds several extra measures of nothing but pounding drums to the start of his main title theme. When the story opens and the score kicks in, the dominant sound is not stirring strings but a recurring, sinister synth hook, so low in the bass register that it’s practically chthonic. The sonic symbolism is not subtle. This is the sound of all-out war.

I reviewed last night’s premiere of House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Season 2 of HBO’s epic “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” ended with massive battles brewing on land, sea and sky between the warring factions of House Targaryen, the royal family of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The Dance of the Dragons has begun.

But with a cast of characters this sprawling, their many schemes, betrayals and furtive alliances can be hard to keep track of — let alone remember after nearly two years since the show last aired. Ahead of the Season 3 premiere on Sunday, here is a refresher on the battle lines and secret pacts that have been drawn for the conflagration to come.

I wrote a primer on House of the Dragon Season 3 for the New York Times, one of several places I’ll be covering the show this season. (Gift link!)

It’s another installment of The Best of ASOIAF on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, the oldest continuously-running ASOIAF/GOT podcast on the internet, and this time it’s Theory Time! This episode, we’re taking a look at The World of Ice and Fire‘s account of the Long Night in the faraway empire of Yi-Ti. What questions does this confirmation of a worldwide conflagration in the distant past answer, and what questions does it raise? Find out here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Stefan and I take one last look at the Tourney at Ashford Meadow in our review of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ Season 1 finale! Come say goodbye to my close personal friends Dunk and Egg right here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The genius of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is that it in this bitter victory, it gives Ser Duncan everything he wanted from the start. Consider what has happened: Dunk took the field at the great tourney at Ashford. He did battle with some of the most famous knights and lords in the realm. He emerged victorious, proving both his mettle and his character in the process. Even the squire he reluctantly took under his wing served him well.

But triumph of Ser Duncan the Tall in his trial of seven is not the stuff of song. There’s no glamour to be found rolling around in the mud, getting stabbed full of holes while pounding another man’s face in. There’s no glory in a victory that comes at a cost steeper than Dunk wanted anyone to pay.

I reviewed tonight’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Cue the Game of Thrones strings and take one last look at last weekend’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with Stefan and me before tonight’s big battle in the latest weekly BLAH podcast!

Due to technical difficulties it took its sweet time posting, but our episode on last weekend’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is available here or anywhere you get your podcasts! To me this is the one where real-world analogues become unmistakable.

Two half-hour episodes remain in the show’s short first season. (It was renewed before it even debuted.) With the combatants already on the field, it feels as if we’re headed for a penultimate episode in the grand “Game of Thrones” tradition, a wall-to-wall battle, followed by an final episode of wrap-up with an eye toward the future. It’s an exciting feeling: I have never quite forgiven “Shogun” or “House of the Dragon” Season 2 for teasing battles that never arrived. (Or won’t until the next season, anyway.) That won’t be an issue here.

But it’s more than the prospect of combat that moves me. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a decency fantasy, a term coined by the comics critic Tom Spurgeon to refer heroic narratives that privilege kindness, cooperation, competence and the fundamental humanity of their heroes over individualistic derring-do or edgy anti-heroism.

Ser Duncan may or may not survive his trial of seven (though the show’s renewal feels like a tip-off). But in the same way that he most likely saved Tanselle’s life by putting himself between her and her attacker, his allies Prince Baelor, the newly minted Ser Raymun, the jocular glory hound Ser Lyonel and the others are all volunteering to try to do the same for him. It’s as if justice were contagious, spread whenever even an ordinary person like Dunk proves willing to defend the defenseless.

I reviewed this weekend’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is already out on HBO Max, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

At any rate, with none of his squire’s privileges and protections of rank and title, Dunk straight-up decks a man he knows to be a Targaryen. Having seen his own father hanged as a boy, he is under no illusions about the nature of Westerosi justice. He knows standing up for Tanselle will cost him his life. Then he does it anyway.

Ser Duncan sees armed and armored agents of the state assaulting a woman of color — racism against the darker-skinned Dornish is pervasive at court during this time period in George R.R. Martin’s stories — and places her life above his own. He does this instinctively, without thinking, without letting the almost certainly fatal consequences deter him. He has seen the powerful doing evil, and he has chosen to fight it. For him, there’s really no choice to make at all.

When Aerion petulantly asks Dunk why he has chosen to throw his life away, it’s a rhetorical question. But it sheds more light on the prince than he realizes. Men like him really can’t understand that kind of selflessness, that sense of kinship with one’s fellow human beings. That inability is the tyrant’s biggest weakness. And it’s what gives free people hope for a fighting chance — a hope which belongs to all who invoke it.

I reviewed tonight’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link! And yes, I’m aware the byline is wrong as of press time.)

The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on the blessed internet is back with a look at this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — available here or wherever you get your podcasts! Come hang out with us as we hang out with what is, so far, a hangout show!

Although we’re only two short episodes into the season’s brief six-episode run, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already a significant shift from the somber grandeur and Grand Guignol horror of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” Its tone is light. Its threats are decidedly less than world-shaking. Its protagonist is a commoner, not a noble. Its editing is positively zippy in places.

Moreover, while the show relies on the interplay of Peter Claffey’s decent but dense Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell’s precocious problem child, Egg, the result is less a “Lone Wolf and Cub”/“The Last of Us” survival story than a mismatched buddy comedy. Ser Duncan may be the only contestant in the tourney dopey enough not to realize that there is more to his suspiciously knowledgeable and headstrong squire than meets the eye.

I reviewed this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on god’s internet is going weekly for the duration of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, baby! Listen to the all-new Boiled Leather Audio Hour on the series premiere — the debut of Dunk and Egg — right here or wherever you get your podcasts!

You don’t hear whistling in Westeros very often. The warring kings, the scheming viziers, the occasional incursion by angry dragons or ice zombies — there’s just not a whole lot to feel cheerful about in the Seven Kingdoms. It’s hard to whistle while you work when the work is a Hobbesian war of all against all, unless you’re being a real Joffrey about it.

But in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the new HBO show set in the same world as “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” there’s whistling on the soundtrack. Lots of it, in fact. Jaunty, carefree whistling, atop a bed of folksy acoustic guitar. The work that composer Dan Romer does here is a world removed from the dramatic, swirling score provided by Ramin Djawadi for this show’s predecessors. Only once does the music hint at that familiar, rousing theme song … and it is immediately cut off by a shot of the show’s hero violently moving his bowels.

In other words, you can literally hear that this is a different kind of show than the previous Westerosi epics. (The episodes are near-sitcom shortness, too.) “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is adapted from the author George R.R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight,” a far more compact and straightforward story of bravery and villainy than his epic “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels. Ira Parker, who created the series with Martin and oversees it as showrunner, is not telling a story that determines the fate of nations or the future of humanity in this fantasy world. (Not so far, anyway.) No wonder the music sounds less like “The Lord of the Rings” and more like “Harold and Maude.”

I reviewed the series premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. Always great to be back on the Westeros beat, especially now that maybe my most beloved character in the setting is on deck. (Gift link!)

It’s the second Boiled Leather podcast to drop today! In the latest installment of our Best of ASOIAF series, Stefan and I take a look at the inspiration for next month’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, “The Hedge Knight” — available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Wanna hear me read the prophecy section of the House of the Undying aloud? Wanna hear me and my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse then talk about everything BUT the meaning of the prophecies? The Best of ASOIAF series continues with a look at one of the most momentous and talked-about chapters of the entire saga on the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, available anywhere podcasts are!

I’ve waited for years to announce this: The complete Boiled Leather Audio Hour archives — over 200 episodes dating back to 2011 — are now available wherever you get your podcasts!

Dive into fourteen years of analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon; wide-ranging discussions about SFF literature, television, and cinema driven by our resident critic, Sean T. Collins; history and politics coverage spearheaded by our resident historian, Stefan Sasse; countless special guests, including Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, acclaimed horror novelist Gretchen Felker-Martin, big names from throughout the ASOIAF fandom, and much more!

Friends, one of the perils of being the longest-running ASOIAF podcast on the internet is that much of our infrastructure was set up years ago, making updating it a real challenge. Until now, only the 20 most recent BLAH episodes were available at any given time via podcasting apps, and you had to dig through our download archives manually if you wanted more. We’ve hunted for a fix for years, hiring professionals and everything, so of course in the end it was something unbelievably simple that everyone had just somehow failed to catch. Ain’t technology grand?

Be that as it may! I could not be more thrilled than to present to you what has become one of my life’s great efforts and achievements. Endless thanks to Andrew Fulton for the miracle work, and of course to my illustrious cohost, Stefan Sasse, without whose herculean efforts and effortless command of countless topics this podcast would have ceased to exist long ago. This is for you, buddy.

And it’s for all of you who’ve ever listened, or ever been curious about listening. Please spread the word far and wide in the fandom: There’s never been a better time for BLAH! BOILED LEATHER FOREVER

art by the mighty Julia Gfrörer

In the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, the longest running GRRM/GoT/HotD podcast on the internet, Stefan and I continue our Best of ASOIAF series with the Battle of the Whispering Wood! I read the whole thing aloud! Available at our Patreon or wherever you find podcasts!