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House of the Dragon Season 3 "Bigger and More Ferocious": Olivia Cooke

House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke offered a promising update on what viewers can expect from Season 3: "It starts off with a bang."

Earlier this week, Matt Smith updated us on the progress of production on the third season of HBO and showrunner Ryan Condal's House of the Dragon (more on that in a minute).  Now, Olivia Cooke (Alicent Hightower) is offering some insights into what we can expect when the series returns. "Well, I think I can say for the show that it is, you know, it starts off with a bang. The first two eps were essentially supposed to be our finale last year. So you can just imagine coming into that sort of energy," Cooke shared with Collider while promoting her upcoming work, The Girlfriend. "It's bigger and more ferocious than ever before, I think, is what I can say."

Checking in with TODAY's Craig Melvin earlier this week in support of his film Caught Stealing, Smith confirmed that there had been a lot of filming going on lately and that they were in "month six of eight." He continued, "We're about to get to the real meat of, you know, the end of the series, really. It's getting hectic. You know, there is a lot sort of going on there. It's tough, but we're nearing the end," adding that they had 35 shooting days left. Earlier this year, Condal confirmed that the "Game of Thrones" prequel series would end its run with the fourth season.

House of the Dragon Showrunner on Changes, GRRM's Reactions

Along with the rollout of the news that production on the third season was underway, Condal sat down for a profile interview with THR about the new season and the series overall, and that included discussing the not-so-pleasant back-and-forth that Condal and George RR Martin (GRRM) got into last fall after GRRM criticized the series on his blog for the changes that were made that he wasn't a particularly big fan of. "It was disappointing," Condal shared. "I will simply say I've been a fan of 'A Song of Ice and Fire' for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of not only my career as a writer but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy. George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer." As for the work that the series is based on, Condal noted that the structure of the work puts them in the position of having to make changes and certain judgment calls.

"It's this incomplete history, and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way. I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did," Condal continued. "Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time. But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time." Condal added, "At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO because that's my job. So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that's what I have to say about it."

Joining the cast for the third season are James Norton as Alicent's (Olivia Cooke) cousin, Ormund Hightower, Tommy Flanagan as Lord Roderick Dustin, Dan Fogler as Ser Torrhen Manderly, Tom Cullen as Ser Luthor Largent, Joplin Sibtain as Ser "Bold" Jon Roxton, Barry Sloane as Ser Adrian Redfort, and Annie Shapero as Alysanne Blackwood, aka "Black Aly."

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