House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal suggests audiences should prepare for new character Ormund Hightower’s arrival.
“He’s the Lord of the Hightower, basically the Tywin Lannister [Charles Dance] of this world,” Condal says in the latest issue of SFX. “He’s the richest guy who’s not sitting on a throne somewhere. Ormund has the largest standing army left in Westeros and a dragon, so he is going to introduce a big old wrinkle into this. Ormund is really a sketch in the book and we don’t have a sense of who he is, so it was really fun diving in and creating a really deep, complex and three-dimensional character out of him that introduces a new kind of complication into the world.”
Ormund is the first cousin of Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) and the nephew of Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). In the books, he’s the head of House Hightower and Lord of Oldtown during the Dance of the Dragons… and in the show, we can only guess that, since it happens to virtually every single Game of Thrones character, he meets a tragic end.
Ormund is played by James Norton, who is perhaps best known for his leading role in the British crime drama Happy Valley (though he’s best known in my heart for playing Meg March’s husband John in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women). Norton famously admitted to never watching Game of Thrones before taking on the role, telling an interviewer that he had no idea who Little Finger was (and therefore couldn’t speak to whether he was the “Little Finger” of House of the Dragon).
House of the Dragon season 3 arrives on HBO Max this June 21 in the US, and June 22 on HBO Max, Sky, and NOW in the UK. In the meantime, check out our guide to the most exciting upcoming TV shows to fill out your watchlist.