Men's Health August 5, 2026 0 Comments

Unlock the Secret Steel: How House of the Dragon Forged Armor That Powers the Legendary Targaryens and Hightowers to Unmatched Strength and Victory!

Right from the get-go, HBO’s Game of Thrones captured our imaginations with jaw-dropping spectacle—massive casts, sweeping landscapes from frozen peaks to scorching deserts, and battles so intense they practically jumped off the screen (yes, actual eye-popping moments included!). Now, if you thought that was something, the spinoff House of the Dragon, just three seasons in, has cranked up the grandeur even further. Think terrifyingly realistic dragons, complex villains, and battles so fierce they almost take your breath away. But here’s the kicker: behind all that CGI fire and fury lies an incredible dedication to authenticity, especially when it comes to the armor that these warriors don. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of chain mail links, thousands of hand-crafted metal pieces, and weeks upon weeks of painstaking design and fabrication—because looking epic on screen isn’t just about slinging a sword, it’s about wearing the story itself. Ever wondered what it takes to make armor that’s as much a character as the knights themselves? You’re about to find out. LEARN MORE

10 min read

RIGHT FROM THE moment it started airing, HBO’s Game of Thrones never shied away from spectacle. In its eight-season run, the show had a cast of what seemed like thousands, went everywhere on-screen from ice-covered mountains to arid deserts, and aired battle scenes so gory that they inspired eye-popping online reaction. (In addition to actual on-screen eye-popping. Spoiler alert!)

And though it’s only three seasons into its run, the Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon (based on George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood), is already awe-inspiring in its scope and reach. Not only are there multiple, terrifying on-screen dragons—big, super detailed ones! With storylines and everything—but the show has also hosted its fair share of shiver-inducing bad guys and awe-inspiring battle scenes.

Thanks to savvy CGI work and more than a few well-placed dragons, HOTD’s battles have been some of the franchise’s fiercest. They’ve also been some of the Thrones franchise’s most intricate, thanks in part to the detailed work of the show’s costume and armor teams.

A group of mounted warriors with banners, led by a bearded man holding a head on a stick.

HBO

Consider these stats from the show’s on-screen armor designer, Simon Brindle. Over the course of just House of the Dragon’s eight-episode third season, Brindle says, his team used over 400,000 chain mail links and 100,000 solid dome rivets, mostly in service of creating pieces of armor for principal characters like Ser Criston Cole and Daemon Targaryen. Brindle says his team also crafted 25,000 custom, laser-cut pieces of metal for its armor this season, some of which—like the chest piece worn by new villain Ormund Hightower—were incredibly detailed.

If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is, especially when you consider Brindle’s team is also producing additional armor pieces for background characters and extras. That doesn’t mean they get to cut corners, however. “We work really hard and everyone puts 110 percent in, but it’s not so much about quantity,” Brindle says. “Instead, it’s very much about quality. Everyone is very driven to do the best they can for us, which makes for remarkable things.”

With season 3’s biggest (and bloodiest) battles still on the show’s dragon-filled horizon, here’s what Brindle and House of the Dragon costume designer Caroline McCall say they do in order to make their show and its armor really shine.

MEN’S HEALTH: Let’s start with Ormund Hightower, a new character who has been spectacularly played by James Norton. How did you go about defining how you’d like his armor to appear?

CAROLINE MCCALL: I start with the script and a lot of research. With Ormund, we’ve seen the Hightowers before, but his character comes in and is so famous. He’s also a big defender of the Faith of the Seven. I was also thinking about Old Town, which we’ve not visited yet, but know that the Hightowers live there and that they’re a really wealthy house. There are so many houses in Westeros wealthier than the Targaryens.

Two armored knights lead a group of soldiers, with banners and horses in a battlefield setting.

HBO

Before every season, I go to all the museums in London that have beautiful armor and artifacts and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was struck by this bust of an Italian commander from the 1400s that was actually made as a throwback to Roman times. It had this particular shape of helmet I really liked, and so when I talked to Ryan [Condal, Dragon’s showrunner] about what we wanted to do, I referenced Italian Renaissance armor because it was so expensive to produce and so beautifully detailed.

I had this idea that Ormund would wear his faith upon his armor, too, and so I worked with our concept artist on how we could represent the Faith of the Seven in a medieval aesthetic. After that, Simon’s process begins, because I might draw something that’s not technically possible or he might say “Well, this is more for our of our period,” because we try really hard to root what we’re doing in the possibilities of the time period we’re in. We’re not trying to create a fantasy series. We’re trying to create a reality that also just happens to have dragons in it.

MH: What time period do you envision for the show?

CM: We’re looking around the 1300s or 1400s in terms of the technology. With Game of Thrones, which is set after House of the Dragon, we were thinking about the Middle Ages too, but in that era, there weren’t massive advances in technology. So you don’t see a massive change between series.

A man in ornate armor holds a small, intricately decorated box in a dimly lit setting.

KEVIN BAKER//HBO

SIMON BRINDLE: All of what we do comes from Caroline. All the ideas and the inspiration and the concept art. It’s great to be working on this job with these people, because they really want to root it in reality.

We’re trying to encapsulate the feeling of both the period and the character who’s going to wear it. So we’re trying to convey Ormund’s Roman Renaissance, emperor-like, imposing figure through visual messaging. We’ve got all the beautiful artwork Caroline created that we were able to put onto the surface of the armor, too, which is quite an involved process. Ormund was quite a big deal [this season], because he has a very distinct and obvious presence on the screen.

MH: How much are you taking an actor’s physique into consideration? You want them to be able to move in the armor and you want it to be period correct, but you also want someone to look the best they can.

SB: Unless the character is meant to look clunky in some way, we’re always trying to make them look the best they possibly can. This comes back to this wonderful piece of sculpture that Caroline found, because the forms on that are quite rounded and Romanesque in some of the detail. We’re trying to make him look as powerful and imposing as possible, but in an elegant way, because that’s the kind of guy he is: Refined, but with a little bit of a menacing undertone.

You’re always trying to make them look as good as they possibly can, and help them feel like they’re the character, which helps with the performance. It’s something you can get hold of and project the character through.

CM: I give Simon the design, and he mocks it up for a fitting, so we can take a look at the dimensions and say “Oh, actually the torso needs to be shorter,” and try to balance the body. You don’t know until an actor walks into the room what their proportions are going to be, or if they bulked up in the past six weeks or something. We have to try the armor on sitting down, too, so you can see that things aren’t going to ride up or ride down.

Fantasy warrior in intricate armor, holding a sword amidst a fiery landscape.

HBO

Sometimes, the physicality of the actor can be different to what you might have expected. With Tom Cullen, who plays Ser Luthor Largent… Tom’s got a great physique, but he’s not really broad. So, part of the design process was to try and make him look as broad and foreboding as possible. That happens in the earlier fitting, where we look at the dimensions and the scale of things. It’s not like a normal costume fitting where I can go “Oh, actually can we move that seam?” With armor, you have to know early on what proportions you want, and you have to stick to them.

We’re fortunate that Ryan really understands the whole process of armor. He gets that it takes at least 20 weeks from meeting the actor until we can have something on set.

MH: What makes it take such a long time?

SB: It’s a bit of everything, really. It’s possible to make a suit of armor in less time, depending on the level of detail, how important the character is, or how much the production wants to invest in putting something great on screen. It’s certainly never a “money is no object and time is no object” situation; we’re very tightly controlled in terms of time and cost. We just try and invest what we can in the time that’s available to us.

20 weeks sounds like a lot of time, but you start off with your initial measuring up with the actor, going through the concept and references with Caroline, and making sure I have an understanding of what it is that Caroline wants to see. Then we often start off with a cardboard mockup on a mannequin for Caroline to have a look at. That might take the better part of a week to pattern, because it’s a structured 3-D thing you’re making by hand. Quite early on, we’ll try and work to the actual actor sizes, too, so we know we’re getting proportions right. Sometimes we don’t have to, but we do often have to go away and make a mannequin the size of the actor.

A group of armored warriors preparing for battle, with one wielding an axe and another in detailed medieval attire.

HBO

The origination process is the biggest chunk of the time. That could be anywhere from eight weeks—when you might not get the richness of detail and refinements you necessarily need—to 12 weeks, which might include fabricating some of the pieces in metal or leather in a sculpting process. I used to make metal and leather armor for people to wear while hitting each other with swords on the field. But because people understandably don’t always want to wear metal all day, we have to produce everything as much as we can in lightweight materials. It’s more time efficient to [use foam or 3D printing to] sculpt the larger components like torsos and helmets, because that also means we can push them around.

We have to go through a whole molding and casting process when we’re sculpting, which can take from two to four weeks, because we’re often dealing with cutting-edge materials, like aircraft and engineering materials, which are super lightweight and super strong. A lot of products we use are used in the orthopedic industry on prosthetic limbs, because you can cast down to two millimeters of thickness. It’s almost as strong as steel, but about a third or a quarter of the weight.

After that, you get into the process of detailing and making it look like the right metal. There’s a whole one- to two-week process of adding the metalized finish on the surface. And before you know it, 20 weeks is gone.

MH: Have you found any tips or tricks in terms of making an actor feel like they’re really inhabiting what it would mean to wear armor?

SB: Whenever we use mail, we try to use real chains because not only does it move really well, but once you put a suit of armor on, it has almost no momentum when you walk. If you’ve got lovely big swishy chain mail skirts and whatever, it all adds to the performance and the feel. With the materials we’re working with, whilst they are very light and semirigid, they’re not like a piece of foam. It’s closer to hard rubber, essentially. So it does have a stability to it, too.

Two men engaged in a sword fight in a medieval battlefield setting, with tents and spectators in the background.

HBO

MH: Caroline, you mentioned how you think about a house’s wealth when you’re thinking about their armor. Do you also think about how their armor will be used? So, if someone’s a dragon rider, for instance, maybe they’d want something more flexible? Or if they’re often at sea, they might not want metal because that could rust?

CM: With the Targaryens’ armor, for me, it’s important that that’s articulated so you get as much movement as possible. Ryan is very keen on plate armor whenever possible. So, with the Targaryen armors that I have designed, they’re all connected with this idea of articulation, and we’ve done it slightly differently for each character.

For Aemond, for instance, it’s not often you have an actor with that physique. Ewan Mitchell is so long and lean, and he has a true medieval physique.

Coming to this show, I became fascinated by the depictions of dragons throughout time. Every culture has had some sort of dragon motif, and in Britain it’s St. George who slayed the dragon. I thought Ewan could carry that pure medieval look of St. George. Also, his character is so connected to his dragon that it’s almost like we’re using the armor to morph Ewan from human to dragon.

Everything on that suit has an angular look. The breast layer itself was a real labor of love, because I wanted it to morph into the dragon. So, we made these handcrafted scales. That suit of armor in particular was such an undertaking, because it was made so beautifully to be like a second skin to Ewan.

Ewan had so much joy and delight at wearing it, too, and made no complaints. He just felt honored that he got this bespoke, beautiful suit, and the way he moves in it is fantastic. He moves like a warrior should move, because the whole articulation of the suit moves with him.

MH: In terms of scale, how many pieces of armor do you think you’ve made over the run of the show?

SB: We deal primarily with the principal characters and originating the looks for the groups and the armies. Then, if there’s a big piece we need for a whole group, we’ll do the originals as far ahead of time as possible. Then we’ll have some of the less technically demanding pieces sent out to be mass-produced elsewhere before they come back to get refined and sent out.

Over the last three seasons, we’re now approaching about 600 sets of armor that we’ve made in total. We run for probably about nine months of the year doing this, so that’s pretty incredible. We’ve managed to produce so much in that amount of time, including suits for probably about 150 to 200 key principal characters like Daemon and Aemond and Ormund and Corlys. So, we’ve produced an awful lot. If you include the background groups and the animals, we must be running into the thousands.

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.