How House of the Dragon Sculpts Heartbreaking Realism Into Fire-Breathing Dragons That’ll Leave You Breathless and Begging for More
Ever wondered what it takes to bring a colossal, fire-breathing dragon to life on your screen—not just any dragon, but the ones dominating Westeros in House of the Dragon season 3? It’s more than just CGI wizardry; it’s a full-on blend of artistry, technology, and a sprinkle of pure magic. After all, how do you capture the raw fury and majestic grace of a creature that exists only in fantasy? This season ups the ante with 22 massive dragons soaring the skies, from the feral Sheepstealer to fan favorites like Balerion and Vhagar, each with its own fierce personality and backstory. But behind the fiery roars and thunderous wings is a painstaking process involving actors, designers, and VFX experts like Dadi Einarsson, who pour decades of experience into animating these beasts to make us care—not just about their epic battles but their souls. So, if you’ve ever found yourself gasping at one of their dramatic onscreen moments and wondered, “How on earth do they pull this off?”—you’re in the right place. Let’s dive into the secrets of how House of the Dragon’s dragons evolve, move, and, yes, even breathe fire with enough flair to set the bar sky-high for fantasy creatures everywhere. LEARN MORE
10 min readThe following story contains some spoilers for House of the Dragon season 3.
HOUSE OF THE Dragon has never been just a clever name. The Game of Thrones prequel has been chock-full of the flying fictional reptiles, all zipping around Westeros in service of the Targaryen clan. A whopping 22 fire-breathing beasties have graced the show over the past two seasons and change, with names like Balerion the Black Dread, Vhagar, Sheepstealer, Quicksilver, and Dreamfyre.
The show’s third season, which premiered June 21, is full of dangerous dragon drama, from a feral beast that can’t be tamed to the death of a fan favorite. But how does House of the Dragon craft all its many beasts, and what are actors and production staff seeing on-set when we’re seeing glorious, dinosaur-like destructors on-screen?
House of the Dragon’s production VFX supervisor, Dadi Einarsson, has spent years animating dragons and other creatures for the big and small screen. Though he’s delighted to talk details about scale and color and point of view, he says he’s most proud of the way he and his team have been able to bring life and sentiment to the show’s on-screen dragons.
“What I really like is, for instance, how people reacted to Vermax dying,” in House of the Dragon’s season 3 premiere, Einarsson says. “People were sad about the character, not thinking about how realistically he moved or how the water looked around him. They forgot about all that and they were just as sad about Vermax dying as they were about Jace.”
“I was lucky enough to go to the latest season premiere, where it was shown in a theater, and I got to experience people seeing what we’ve been developing,” Einarsson adds. “Just hearing the gasps and seeing people react to a digital dragon as if it were the real thing… that’s the ultimate joy for me.”
Here’s more of what Einarsson had to say about House of the Dragon’s titular beasts, from how they’re created to what fans can look forward to as the season marches toward its finale.
MEN’S HEALTH: In your mind, how have the dragons evolved over the show’s three seasons? Visually and story-wise, how are the dragons we’re seeing now different from at the beginning?
DADI EINARSSON: The longer we’ve had with them, the more opportunity we’ve had to develop them as characters, to really make them nuanced and multifaceted, with their own traits.
There’s always a bit of that in the way a creature is described in a script, but a lot of the time [the descriptions are] more physical than what’s going on in their brains.
For instance, in season 3, we had this really interesting dragon called Sheepstealer. He’s kind of a stray—he’s never been raised by dragon keepers like the other dragons—so he hasn’t been taught the ways of Velaryon dragons. I thought of him like a pit bull, or a stray you’d find in your back alley. You’re trying to entice him and you want to try and bring him in because you fall in love with him, but you know he’s never fully under your control.
MH: The aesthetics of Sheepstealer are also very interesting, because he’s dirtier and grittier and more rough and tumble than, say, Syrax, who’s owned by Queen Rhaenyra. How does that dragon upkeep manifest itself on-screen?
DE: We imagined Sheepstealer might have been shunned because of some deformities or something. So, if he’s never been accepted, you have to think about how that may have happened in the first place.
He’s got this crazy underbite, he’s got vitiligo, he’s very gnarly, and he’s very spiky. Working that all into the design, it does make it more interesting that Lady Rhaena tries to bond with him. She sees the beauty in him.
MH: How much of that description—the gnarliness, the vitiligo, et cetera—is in the original source material, and how much is a development decision amongst the VFX team?
DE: I don’t remember whether there was vitiligo in the books, but our process does very much start on the page. We go to the books and then we redevelop what’s there to make it screen-friendly.
We try not to veer away too much from the books, but with someone like Syrax, for instance, she’s Rhaenyra’s dragon, so you want her to be graceful and regal [like her rider.] Carxes is an embodiment, or mirror, of Daemon Targaryen, so you do get that kind of thing where they’re almost like the alter ego of the rider they’re paired with.
MH: Do you have a character bible for each dragon? How detailed are those, if so?
DE: We absolutely have a bible. It starts with [George R.R. Martin’s] books and gets developed with Ryan Condal, our showrunner. It’ll be everything from a written description of the dragon’s size, color, age, gender, and character traits to how we intend to flesh this character out.
Size is very important, because everyone asks, “How big is this dragon?” When we start prepping with directors, there’s a written page that has the answer. But you really have to figure out “What size beast am I looking at?”
MH: I’m sure you’ve seen, but there are some very helpful diagrams online that have them all sized out in order.
DE: Yeah, and we created a lineup in-house, too. Originally they were all in one line, but now we’ve got two lines because there are so many of them.
MH: How much of what we’re seeing on-screen is done in post? Are you 3D printing dragon skin textures for actors to feel or are there heads actors interact with? Or is that all done in VFX?
DE: It’s mostly done in post, but we do have two dragon performers, a guy and a girl, who are dressed in blue and they’ve got this pole that has a fiberglass blue head of a dragon that they work with. We actually have different dragon heads for different dragons, but it’s very difficult to get them up to the size of the actual dragon if they’re the bigger ones. So, then we have to use laser pointers or long poles with tennis balls on them for actors to react to.
It is nice having the blue head there, though, if it’s a more intimate scene. They might go up and touch the snout, or there’ll be a bit of contact, which really helps. Any kind of tool you can use to help the actors suspend disbelief and lock into the performance helps a lot.
Also, because flying on the dragons is a big aspect of what we do, all of the dragons that are ridden have saddles, because they’ve been with the Velaryons and the Targaryens. However, Sheepstealer, being a wild dragon, does not have a saddle, so we created a back piece from our model. We gave a 3D-printed model we made to Waldo Mason, our special effects makeup guy, and he built out the back piece with the spikes and painted it to be the proper finish of Sheepstealer so that when Phoebe, our Rhaena actor, climbs up onto the dragon to ride, she’s holding on to the spikes of the model. That’s the finished texture of what you see on-screen, and then we extend that texture or replace it where we can.
MH: Having something like a saddle has to help get into the mindset of the rider, too, versus just being on something like a green screen pommel horse.
DE: When we shoot a dragon flying scene, the whole thing has been pre-vized (visualized) so the actor can see exactly what’s going to happen. They know what they’re acting towards and can try to remember that. Within that shot we use this thing called a buck, which is actually like a gimbal that rolls the saddle around and then the camera flies around them, with wind blowing and everything.
They can step off between takes and see it all being put together in real time, so they’ll know how it looks in low-res animation and get relatively quick feedback on whether they want to tweak their performance for the next run.
MH: The season premiere has a pretty big dragon battle, with Sheepstealer, Moondancer, and Vermax all interacting as a sea battle rages below them. What were some of the specific challenges of the dragon action in that episode?
DE: Where to start with that episode! It’s so huge, so there were so many things to solve.
The first thing we did was work very closely with [director] Loni Peristere and with the editor Crispin Green, and we did that very early. So from storyboards we were doing animatics of basically the whole episode from the beginning of the battle and figuring out what we needed to solve. It was a good 30 minutes of episode that we cut together from those storyboards, too.
Usually when we do flying dragon scenes or people standing or sitting on dragons, it’ll be in a soundstage with a volume of lights around it. For the end of the chase scene with Jace (Prince Jacaerys Targaryen), Mike Dawson and the SFX team built a new gimbal that we could submerge in water, so we put [the actor who plays Jace] underwater on his dragon saddle in a tank outside. We filmed the dragon movement on that, just kind of bobbing up and down on the water surface until he ultimately gets pulled under by the dragon and has to unclip and swim to the surface.
MH: Let’s talk about the dragon’s fire. How do you make sure you get that right? Because we all know what fire looks like. Are you thinking about the internal temperatures of the dragons and beyond?
DE: On a show like this, we’re very privileged to have a big special effects team and a production that supports us in saying we want to get a unit on the back lot to just blow a bunch of stuff up. There’s a long history in Game of Thrones of actually setting fire to people, so our stunt team is very good at that, and very used to being asked to set 20 people on fire.
We have a lot of fire cannons and things we can set on fire, which we can use as either the base of whatever shot we’re working on or as a reference so we can say objectively, “It should look more like this. It’s not feeling quite right.”
MH: “That dragon is taller, so the tube of flame should come from a higher angle.”
DE: Absolutely.
MH: How did you decide how the dragons would move? Obviously there are no dragons in real life and we don’t have videos of real dinosaurs, so how did that work?
DE: It’s always based on observation of the most analogous creature that we’re familiar with in nature, whether it’s like alligators or whatever else.
My background is actually animation. I was an animator and a creature supervisor, and so I now have two or three decades of experience thinking about how these creatures should move.
With dinosaurs, you have to go all the way back to Jurassic Park. They kind of figured it out, and that was taken as the launching point of how these creatures would move.
You really just try and find a real creature that’s as close in anatomy as the ones we have. Our dragons’ anatomies… you know, they’re fantasy creatures, but if you look at all their limb proportions, they all feel similar [to real animals]. If you take them apart and look at their skeletons, they would have a femur and a tibia. The spine is the same way and the tail. It all kind of matches what we have in nature.
Then there’s weight, and just the kind of regular rules of animation, like how you move heavy creatures around. We call it follow-through and overlap.
So, how do they take off? They can’t just kind of shoot off into the air, so you have to have them lumbering along or jumping off something higher. Then it’s seeing how heavily they drop before the wings catch the weight, and you feel that kind of easing out. When they ease out, you’ve got the head, the chest, and the pelvis, which are the three centers of weight of a creature like that. When the head pulls up a few fractions of a second later, the chest will dip a bit, and then the pelvis will dip a bit after that and then the tail will drop down. That’s what we call overlap, meaning there’s a ripple effect when the weight gets thrown around before the dragon pulls up and flies away.
MH: You mentioned alligators, which I see when you’re talking about a dragon lumbering or skittering around. What animals did you use to model their takeoff or flight?
DE: We actually used an albatross as a reference this season, but for a landing. It’s when Sheepstealer lands up on the mountaintop and throws Rhaena off, he has kind of a clumsy landing. So we looked at albatrosses for that, because they’re famous for their clumsy landings and how they struggle to take off.
A lot of birds aren’t that heavy—they’ve got quite light bones—whereas our creatures are many tons, so at that point it becomes more about the established rules of screen creature animation.
MH: It is funny to have to think, “Well, dragons move like this,” because really, dragons don’t actually move in any sort of way. It’s all invented by popular culture.
DE: Absolutely, though I think it’s kind of the same situation as we have with dinosaurs. There’s now an established way that people accept dinosaurs should move, because we’ve had 10 or 15 films that have pretty much stuck with what was put down in the first Jurassic Park. It’s developed and evolved a little bit, but if someone did something completely different, people wouldn’t buy it because that’s not how we’re now used to seeing dinosaurs.
I think the animators on [Jurassic Park] really made the right choices and thought about it long and hard. They’re now the grandfathers of digital creature animation.
Watch House of the Dragon Here
Marah Eakin is a Los Angeles–based freelance reporter who’s been writing about pop culture and lifestyle since 2010. She spent 12 years at The A.V. Club and has contributed to Wired, Vulture, Dwell, The Strategist, Thrillist, The Ringer, Fodor’s, IndieWire, and a number of other publications.
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