New Look At Fabien Frankel’s Criston Cole And Freddie Fox’s Gwayne Hightower Revealed As They Finally Reach Harrenhal

‘House of the Dragon‘ has never been shy about making its characters suffer for their choices, and season three has proven especially unforgiving when it comes to the men caught in the middle of the Targaryen civil war.

Between brutal naval battles and shifting allegiances, the show has spent its opening episodes stripping away any illusions its characters once had about honor or glory. Few storylines capture that erosion quite like the long, grinding march shared by two of the Greens’ most conflicted knights.

Since the season premiere, Ser Criston Cole and Gwayne Hightower have been stuck traveling toward Harrenhal, waiting on Aemond and his dragon Vhagar to arrive and help them seize the crumbling castle from Team Black.

The two men could not be more different in temperament, with Cole sinking further into fatalism and despair while Gwayne clings to a rigid code of honor that increasingly feels out of place in the war unfolding around them. That tension has quietly become one of the more compelling threads of the season.

New images have now surfaced offering a first look at Frankel and Fox as their characters finally reach Harrenhal in the show’s upcoming fourth episode, premiering this Sunday, July 12, on HBO and HBO Max. The photos show both men in full armor amid their marching host, hinting that their long and grueling journey is finally coming to an end just as the story arrives at one of its most anticipated locations of the season.

Fox has been candid about how difficult it has been to portray Gwayne’s internal conflict as he serves under a commander he no longer fully understands. “It’s very difficult, they have such opposing views on how to see this war out, and when you’re second in command to someone who has, in some sense, got a death wish, you’ve got this load on your back, and you don’t know how to shift out from under it,” Fox told Mashable. He added that Gwayne’s training in the old ways of chivalry makes the brutal realities of this war feel especially disorienting for him.

Frankel, for his part, has described this stretch of the season as an unusually isolating one for Criston, largely detached from the political maneuvering happening elsewhere in the story. He has said the character is essentially left to stew in his own nihilism, weighed down by the aftermath of the devastating battle at Rook’s Rest. That kind of prolonged desolation has made Cole a very different figure from the man audiences first met back in the show’s earliest episodes.

Beyond the emotional weight, the actors have also opened up about the physical toll of the role, particularly when it comes to their armor. Frankel has joked about how cumbersome the costume was in the show’s earliest days, recalling that it once took a full twenty-five minutes just to get in and out of it, a delay that would bring the entire production to a halt. He noted that the costume department eventually made portions of it removable partway through the first season, though Fox has admitted he still spends much of his time trying to convince the crew to let him shed a few pieces whenever possible.

Once Criston and Gwayne finally reach Harrenhal, the episode’s trailer suggests they will cross paths with Alys Rivers, the mysterious, centuries-old figure tied to Aemond, who has been left in a precarious position after being stabbed in a previous episode. Exactly what that encounter reveals remains to be seen, but it promises to be one of the more pivotal moments of the episode, given how much has been left unresolved at the castle. Fans have been eagerly speculating about what state they will find Aemond in once they arrive.

Showrunner Ryan Condal has previously teased that Criston will receive more backstory this season, offering a chance for audiences to understand the man behind his increasingly ruthless decisions. With his arc set to collide directly with Harrenhal’s simmering mysteries in the episode ahead, this next chapter could prove to be one of the more consequential turns in Cole’s long and complicated journey through the war.

What are you most looking forward to seeing when Criston Cole and Gwayne Hightower finally arrive at Harrenhal? Let us know in the comments.