A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner: "Season 1 was definitely written for George RR Martin"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

On a grassy hillside, a young hero with a sword on his hip stares out to his destiny. Fame, glory, honour – and gold. Familiar music, the award-winning Game of Thrones theme, swells majestically as young Duncan takes a step towards history…

Cut to the same man, terrified, emptying his bowels behind a tree. Because A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – which begins this week on Sky Atlantic – isn’t quite the grand epic we have come to expect from the world of Game of Thrones, even if it is set in the same fictional land of Westeros.

“I joke sometimes that we’re just Game of Thrones without all the stuff,” laughs showrunner Ira Parker. “My goal is to make this stand on its own so that, even if none of the other shows had happened, you could still watch episode one and you could follow that journey.”

Airing from 2011 to 2019, Game of Thrones – adapted from George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels – was fantasy drama on an epic scale and one of the biggest TV successes this century. When the inevitable spin-off, House of the Dragon, came in 2022, it was in the form of a prequel set centuries earlier, when an even grander conflict was brewing between the noble houses of Westeros.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a humbler prospect. It’s set about 90 years after House of the Dragon and 90 years before Game of Thrones and eschews its predecessors’ huge casts and continent-spanning action. Instead, it follows penniless knight Ser Duncan the Tall (aka Dunk, played by Peter Claffey) and his bald-headed squire Egg (played by Dexter Sol Ansell), who turn up at a tournament hoping to win money. “It’s a buddy comedy,” suggests Parker. “It’s a ‘lone wolf and cub’ story. It’s an adventure series.”

Not that there aren’t still sky-high expectations. This first series is adapted from The Hedge Knight, a novella written by Martin in 1998, and over the years (and two literary sequels), dynamic duo Dunk and Egg have attracted an affectionate fanbase.

“My favourite part of the books and the original TV show is the odd-couple pairings,” Parker says. For those who’ve watched Game of Thrones, he likens Dunk and Egg to the characters played by Gwendoline Christie and Daniel Portman: “It’s like Brienne and Pod: the TV show.”

But it’s taken a while to bring that simple idea to screen. Parker, 41, was working as a writer on House of the Dragon when he first heard whispers that Martin’s other Westeros-set books could become a TV show. After he was given the job, it took even longer to work out how to do it.

“That was a pre-pandemic writers’ room,” he says. “That feels like a lifetime ago. I had no children and a tiny little apartment in West Hollywood. Now I’m living in Belfast and my third child is due in a couple of days.”

A key difficulty was finding a convincing Dunk and Egg, described in the books as a nearly seven-foot-tall man-mountain and a tiny bald boy respectively. Not quite central casting.

“We scoured the world for the tallest people we could possibly find that had any sort of acting experience,” Parker says. “It’s hard – Hollywood doesn’t like tall actors. But we got really lucky because Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell are the only two people on planet Earth who could have done this, and they both agreed.”

In 29-year-old Claffey, he says, they struck gold. Not only is he tall – 6ft 5in – with a TV CV that includes Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters, but he’s also an ex-professional rugby player, which makes him convincing as rough-and-ready Dunk.

“There are things that Peter does so easily that we would have to get a stunt guy to do,” Parker marvels. “This big, heavy sack that he just casually throws up on the ramparts, and goes over…

“And Dexter is the best child actor on planet Earth. It feels unfair to call him a child actor. He’s professional. He can riff. He takes notes.”

As we speak, Parker is on set with them filming season two, already commissioned for next year. Beyond that, Martin only published one further novella starring the duo, but famously, Game of Thrones skipped ahead of Martin’s unfinished book series. Could this do the same?

“George has a document of everything that happens for 13, 14, 15 of these novellas,” Parker says. “He just has to write them. The nice thing is, we know what the ending is. We would never be left making anything up. We would just have a looser road map than what we have right now. The show’s a reflection of the novellas, of the underlying source on which they are based. We take it back to the books. We drop you into a new location every season. We tell you a story and we wrap it up. And we have a bit of fun. So if you’re a fan of the books, hopefully you’ll like this show.”

In any case, he says, he has already satisfied the only viewer who matters: Martin himself. “In this job you don’t try to write for a wide audience, because so many people like so many different things,” he says. “You pick a person, and you write for them. Season one was definitely written for George. The Hedge Knight is very close to him. He’s told me before that book is, he thinks, the best thing that he’s ever written.

“He read every first draft of all the episodes. I think they went to him first, even before they went to HBO. And me and him would have conversations. It was rarely contentious. I’ll not say ‘never’…”

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is available on Sky and NOW, with new episodes arriving on Mondays. In the US, the show airs on HBO on Sundays.

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