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HBO’s upcoming fantasy series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms took to the stage Thursday at New York Comic Con, where showrunner Ira Parker, co-creator and author George R.R. Martin, and stars Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell discussed the Westeros-set series.
In addition to releasing the show’s trailer, the panel also revealed several intriguing details about what viewers can expect from the show, with Martin perhaps revealing a bit too much about some of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ key plot twists.
From big battles to cast Mario Kart competitions, here’s what we learned at the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms NYCC panel.
Based on Martin’s novella The Hedge Knight, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set a century before the events of Game of Thrones, and long after the last Targaryen dragons have died out. The series introduces audiences to new knight Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey), also known as “Dunk.” After the death of his former hedge knight master, he heads to a tournament at Ashford Meadow to earn some coin.
Jousting is among the challenges Dunk will face at Ashford Meadow, and for Martin, those sequences were the most important to get right.
“I set [the show’s team] a challenge, which I think Ira and people have delivered,” Martin said at the panel. “I said, ‘Let’s do the best jousting sequences that have been ever put on film.’ A modest little challenge for Ira and this group.”
Martin cited 1952’s Ivanhoe as the golden standard for jousting scenes before telling the audience, “You guys can judge how well we did, but I think we did pretty well.”
Parker added: “We also did something hopefully no one’s ever seen before, which is a tournament at night, which just looks badass.”
Throughout the panel, Parker emphasized that the show’s perspective was entirely that of Dunk, a member of the smallfolk with little affinity for the politicking and backstabbing on display in Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon. Because of that, the tone is very different from that of HBO’s other Westeros shows.
“Following Dunk on this journey should be a very grounded, gritty, earthy, ground-up feel,” Parker said. “We’ve never had this perspective before. Somebody who grew up in the slums of King’s Landing as an orphan, who came up in this world. [He] didn’t have a name, didn’t have an inheritance, didn’t have any money, doesn’t have the best training in the whole world, and he’s just trying to make it. He’s trying to go out and do something hard that he’s never done before. He’s out of his comfort zone. And hopefully a lot of that will resonate with a lot of our audience.”
For Claffey, playing Dunk meant playing someone who was learning to embrace all parts of himself, even his lowly background.
“He tries to put away or extinguish that side of him that he wants to forget, that young boy in Flea Bottom just trying to survive. [He was] almost half-human, half-dog, roaming the streets,” Claffey said. “But it serves him to know that that is who he is in certain situations towards the end of our story. It serves him to have that personality, that ‘never give up’ and ‘fight tooth and nail’ sort of characteristic. So I think he gets to sort of accept himself. It’s one big violent therapy session.”
Dunk is only half of the duo at the center of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The other half is his squire Egg (Ansell), a bald young boy determined to serve Dunk at Ashford Meadow.
The pair’s chemistry is key to Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas — could Claffey and Ansell’s chemistry measure up?
According to the panel alone, we’re in good hands. Claffey and Ansell share the same teasing dynamics on display in the novellas, especially when it came to discussing one thing in particular: Mario Kart.
During filming, Claffey and Ansell would go to an arcade to play Mario Kart, where they racked up a ton of tickets. (For what? “A PS5,” Ansell said.)
“One of my favorite ways to decompress after set, because we had so much work to do, was to come back and kick Dexter’s ass in Mario Kart,” Claffey said.
“I kept winning!” Ansell retorted.
If Dunk and Egg found themselves in 2025, you could imagine their discussions sounding a lot like that.
When panel moderator Brandon Davis asked Parker, Claffey, Ansell, and Martin what episode they were most excited for audiences to see, all four had different answers. For Parker, it was episode 6, because that meant the audience will have seen the entire show. Claffey said that episode 4 “hits the hardest,” while Ansell said he loves the third episode.
But it was Martin who divulged the most, calling episode 5 “very potent, because that’s the big action episode.”
According to Martin, episode 5 features a Trial of Seven, which readers of The Hedge Knight will recognize as a trial by combat with seven champions on each side of the battle, instead of just one. It’s a pivotal moment in The Hedge Knight, and revealing that it happens in episode 5 might have been more of a spoiler than HBO was prepared to give months before the show’s Jan. 18 debut. But that wasn’t the only spoiler moment from the panel.
Huge, huge spoiler warning for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms incoming for anyone who hasn’t read The Hedge Knight.
Early interviews and trailers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms have kept details about Egg vague beyond him just being Dunk’s sassy squire. But book readers know that he is actually Aegon V Targaryen, a prince in disguise.
Martin alluded to this during the NYCC panel, telling Ansell, “You’re not smallfolk. You’ll always be a Targaryen, and you have royal blood in you.”
At that point, nervous giggles arose from the audience and even the panel, who likely didn’t expect the cat to be out of the bag less than an hour after the trailer’s release. But to learn why Egg disguised himself and what role he and Dunk have to play in the wider history of Westeros, you’ll have to watch A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. (Or check out The Hedge Knight to prepare!)
