Game of Thrones author opens up on conflicts with Ryan Condal

George R.R. Martin stated in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that his relationship with Ryan Condal, co-creator of the series House of the Dragon, is “terrible,” reports EFE.

The author of the famous Game of Thrones saga spoke openly about the reasons why his relationship with Ryan Condal deteriorated so much, citing, among other things, changes made to the characters that directly affected the plot of the TV adaptation of his book Fire & Blood, on which HBO’s House of the Dragon is based, CE Report quotes AGERPRES.

“I hired Ryan. I thought Ryan and I were partners. And I was throughout the first season. I read the first drafts of the scripts. I gave him notes. He changed some things. It worked very well, I thought,” the writer told the American publication.

Martin implied that things changed with the second season of House of the Dragon, stating, “Basically, he stopped listening to me.”

“I would give him notes and nothing would happen. Sometimes he would explain why he wasn’t doing it. Other times he’d say, ‘Ah, okay, I’ll think about it.’ Things got worse and I started getting angrier and angrier. Eventually, HBO told me to give them all my notes and that they would give Ryan our combined notes,” he added.

Regarding the current state of his relationship with Ryan Condal, Martin said: “It’s more than bad. It’s terrible.”

In 2024, the writer expressed his dissatisfaction in a blog post, but his representative deleted the post after an HBO executive called, unhappy with Martin’s words.

According to sources from The Hollywood Reporter, the relationship between Martin and Condal reportedly reached a breaking point during a Zoom call with the series producers and some HBO executives, in which the author detailed his objections to the co-creator’s vision for the third season.

In March 2025, Condal assured in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he had done “everything possible to include Martin in the adaptation process,” noting that the writer had refused to “acknowledge practical problems in a reasonable way.”

As reported by CE Report, the third season of the series House of the Dragon is set to premiere in the fall.

On January 18, the production A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on Martin’s novellas Tales of Dunk and Egg, will be released.