‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3 Is Opening With Pure Naval Chaos, and Steve Toussaint Has the Receipts
Few fantasy series have made audiences wait as long for a single battle as ‘House of the Dragon’ has for the Battle of the Gullet. Since the show’s earliest days, the legendary naval clash has loomed over the entire Dance of the Dragons story arc, whispered about in fan circles and promised in interviews, serving as the distant payoff that justified every episode of political scheming and family betrayal that came before it.
The battle centers on warring factions of the Targaryen family clashing at sea along a stretch of water known as the Gullet, with Steve Toussaint’s character Lord Corlys Velaryon, the former Master of Ships widely known as the Sea Snake, playing a central role in the conflict. Corlys has been one of the show’s most compelling figures since the beginning, and Toussaint has spoken previously about how his early conversations with the creative team focused on the character’s identity as a father rather than a warrior, a quality that has quietly defined every decision Corlys makes on screen.
At SXSW London this week, Toussaint gave fans the most candid preview yet of what is coming when the new season kicks off. Speaking at the Deadline Studio event, the actor described the battle in blunt and enthusiastic terms: “It’s mad. For people who know the story, it’s very exciting. They’ve been waiting for this particular sea battle which, luckily, for my character and my son’s character are central to that. Yes, it’s huge.”
On the production scale, Toussaint revealed that the crew built three ships and two tanks, one wet and one dry, and then shot water cannons directly at the cast throughout filming. Perhaps surprisingly, the entire sequence was shot at Leavesden Studios in London, though that was never the original plan.
Toussaint recalled that showrunner Ryan Condal and co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik had originally promised him that the battle would be filmed on location in South Africa when the subject first came up at the end of production on season one.
Condal himself has been equally effusive in his praise of the episode, telling Entertainment Weekly that the season three premiere is “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made.” He went further by comparing the battle’s narrative importance to the Battle of Helm’s Deep in ‘The Lord of the Rings’, stating that to tell the story without it would be like making Peter Jackson’s saga without its most iconic sequence.
Abigail Thorn, who plays Triarchy Admiral Sharako Lohar leading the assault against Corlys and his fleet, described her character with an equally vivid comparison, saying she is “Captain Ahab in this episode” on a quest for her white whale.
The anticipation arrives on the back of a season two that, despite never delivering the Gullet battle at all, still managed to average around 25 million viewers across platforms and saw its finale generate the biggest streaming day in Max history. Season three picks up with Aemond Targaryen sitting on the Iron Throne while Rhaenyra works to expand her dragon forces, and episodes will run weekly on HBO through August.
With the Gullet now confirmed as the season opener and the cast clearly energised by what they filmed, the pressure is on to deliver something that earns every superlative thrown at it. Whether the Battle of the Gullet can truly claim its place alongside the franchise’s greatest spectacles is the question ‘House of the Dragon‘ fans have been asking for two years now, and it would be great to hear which moment from the Dance of the Dragons you have been most looking forward to seeing brought to life on screen.
