House of the Dragon is still smoldering from Season 2’s chaos, but thanks to Tom Glynn-Carney, we’ve already got a tease of what’s cooking in HOTD's upcoming Season 3. Between Alicent and Criston Cole’s sudden shift, Daemon brooding on an island and in Harrenhal, and Aegon II getting literally roasted, Season 2 was a lot. But if you’ve been waiting for Aegon to evolve beyond a scorched “royal mess,” your patience might finally pay off.
Tom Glynn-Carney peeled back the armor a bit to discuss Aegon’s next chapter during an interview with Awards Buzz. The English actor offers insight into the embattled king’s shifting mindset, and it sounds like Season 3 won’t be business as usual for the bottle-swigging, chaos-courting monarch. The actor shared:
This quest for an understanding of who he is, and why he is the way he is, and answering a lot of questions for himself that later might lend themselves to him kinda leveling up as a human being and taking responsibility and casting light on those areas that were otherwise very shadowed and hidden in dusty corners within himself.
Some say Aegon’s the most compelling character in the prestige fantasy series—I’m one of them. So yeah, this tease from the man under the white Targaryen wig is exciting. It's a long way from the guy we met in Season 1, who was naked, drunk, and hiding from his own coronation.
According to Glynn-Carney, Season 3’s version of the current King of Westeros will be more locked in:
This version of him feels driven, colder, blinkers on, eyes on the prize here.
If that doesn’t sound like a king finally taking the Iron Throne seriously, I don’t know what does.
It’s a smart and necessary move. Aegon hasn’t exactly been a beacon of stability, as his rise to power was more akin to an “accidental frat bro with a crown” than that of a legitimate ruler. And while Season 2 started nudging him toward emotional depth (losing his son and nearly dying will do that), he’s still had the subtlety of a wildfire in a wheat field. Now, though, it sounds like he’s on the verge of becoming something more than a narrative punching bag. And for my money, that is truly exciting.
Truthfully, House of the Dragon needs this sort of depth. The show’s been leaning hard into team Black and Rhaenyra’s point of view, painting Aegon and the Greens as the faction to root against. That worked early on, but we’re deep enough into this Targaryen civil war that viewers need more than one sympathetic camp. And if Aegon starts showing layers —real, messy, morally gray ones— that could finally restore some of the franchise’s trademark ambiguity.
What’s important to remember is the audience doesn’t need Aegon to be likable. He just has to be human. Like so many of the best characters of Game of Thrones, he should be flawed, he can be cold and calculating—but maybe, just maybe, a little self-aware.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens when Aegon, power in hand, finally asks himself why he wanted it. Season 3 is expected in 2026, though no date has been set. In the meantime, you can stream every shocking Game of Thrones moment and House of the Dragon episode with an HBO Max subscription.
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