@Courtesy of HBO Max
Q: We’re back in Westeros, but this time from the perspective of the common people. What elements did you seek to include that would remind us of the previous series and what would maintain the unique personality of this project? Do you think that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is actually a good entry point for an audience that is unfamiliar with Westeros?”
IRA PARKER: It makes an excellent entry point for people who did not come to Game of Thrones the first time or the second time for whatever reason. We’re fairly simple and straightforward in our approach. We have one POV character in Ser Duncan the Tall, who teams up with Egg throughout. For the most part, we’re telling one story, it allows people a little bit more clarity as to what we’re following. Dunk is an immediately likable human being. He’s honest, he has a lot of self-doubt and anxieties, which hopefully people will recognize from their own journeys in their own lives. He’s just a kid with a silly dream who wants to go out and be a knight, but he doesn’t quite know how to achieve that. He maybe doesn’t have the skill set for this yet. He knows how daunting it’s going to be, how difficult the road is ahead.
Q: Being the first to bring Dunk and Egg to live action, what were the most vital relationship dynamics between them two that you thought were the most important and you had to keep from the book?”
IRA PARKER: When they first meet each other, these two characters are actually quite lonely. I’m not sure they both completely recognize it as that. Obviously Dunk has just lost his longtime mentor and pretty much the only person in the whole world who even knows he exists. And we find Egg in a different loneliness by himself. He’s been abandoned, he’s aimless. There’s something unconscious about the reason they seek each other out. This whole story is about family, about the different nature of how families are made. This relationship is at its core, a knight and a squire, but that’s also a mentor and mentee, a master and apprentice. But there’s also a father and son. Ser Arlen was a father figure to Dunk, even though that was a complicated relationship. Dunk is now very protective over Egg, they have a complicated relationship.
Q: How did you two prepare? How did you create this connection that we can see, and I can actually see it even happening right now?
PETER CLAFFEY: I met Dexter right at the end of my auditioning process. We did a chemistry read together. It was the last little audition we had in Lucy Bevan’s office in London. He was nine years old at the time. But the illusion of an immature kid dissipated very, very quickly. Dexter is such an impressive mature little man. It feels like you’re working with an actor that’s been in the industry for 50 years. He’s incredibly mature. I was so impressed at how he was able to take notes from Owen, our first block director. He’s got an incredibly bright, bright future ahead of him. We spent a lot of time together, had two months of preparation in Belfast. We went to the arcades a lot, we did horse riding every day and we did combat training with Cece, one of the stunt coordinators. I am so glad to be his friend now, I’m very close with him and his family, they’re lovely people.
DEXTER SOL ANSELL: We would always go to the arcades, a big part of our relationship. We really connected through that. From the first audition, we just clicked. It feels like I’ve been with these guys for my whole life. It feels so weird because how I’m so close to them, we just feel like buddies but at the end of the day they’re all adults, so I guess that feels weird.
Q: Sir Duncan the Tall seems like a gentle giant. How did you find the character in you apart from the height which obviously was a main casting necessity?
PETER CLAFFEY: Dunk obsesses over things and worries about things a lot, has some serious anxiety issues, I’ve got a lot of experience with that stuff. The first time when I got the job and went up to meet Owen and Ira, I was violently ill with anticipation and nervousness. I suppose both Dunk and I have that in common. I admire his moral compass and his black and white sense of chivalry. I’ve learned a lot from the character itself. In a world as ruthless as Westeros and as vicious as it can be where there’s a lot of backstabbing and betrayal, it’s quite beautiful and endearing to see a character like Dunk, who’s trying to navigate it in a moral, good valued way.
@Courtesy of HBO Max
Q: Westeros is a world where honor is praised, but survival often demands stepping on others. So were there times in which you personally questioned whether doing the right thing was actually a possible thing in Westeros? Did you ever morally question your own characters?
FINN BENNET: Never questioned. All very fair, all very justified. I don’t think honor matters for most Targaryens, so I’m actually going to pass it to the second most honorable character, I’m going to go with Shaun Thomas.
SHAUN THOMAS: Raymun is very honorable, but his sense of survival is under the shackles of Stefan. When he gets to move around Ashford with Dunk, he finds himself a little bit more free flowing. He enjoys being around Dunk.
DANIEL INGS: You have this idea in your head of the bleakness because of these big moments where there’s death and carnage and chaos. What’s so fun about the writing is that you never know who’s going to survive. But there is a little gene of hope that exists in all of it and it’s expanded upon here. Even in Game of Thrones, you’ve got this desire to see the Stark kids reunited. In this one, you just want these two characters to survive. You know you want the other characters that they bump into and interact with to see that goodness in them. So no, I didn’t question it for one second.
BERTIE CARVELL: It does seem to be the question at the heart of the whole thing, isn’t it? Whether it’s possible to do the right thing and whether there’s a space for that. It’s Dunk who’s asking that. There’s the possibility that the cynicism will overwhelm him, and I find that very relatable in our own world. I think we’re probably all asking ourselves that all the time, whether you can find the moral courage to do the right thing, whether it feels like a wasted effort. That’s why it’s good television, it’s good storytelling.
Q: Did you come into this with the expectation of blood and gore and then be surprised by the quiet, funny moments, the rough-edged humor?. Did you already know?
BERTIE CARVELL: It’s really unusual in television these days to see all the scripts up front. It really counts when, as with this project, you can read the thing from start to finish and know what you’re a part of. We’re all little storytelling organisms, and things are always greater than the sum of parts. The reason they’re good is usually that everyone has brought all of their creativity to the bear. To have these fully formed stories and beautifully made scripts, that really helps to know what you’re a part of. That said, I don’t think I knew how charming and funny it would be until I saw it. In filmmaking, you’re one of this vast team of people and you don’t really know what you’re in until you see it. It was delightful to sit and watch it and realize how charming it is. It’s a beautifully made thing.
Q: How do you find the balance between the comic relief moments for Raymun and the scenes where he needs to step up and be taken seriously?
SHAUN THOMAS: I’ve never actually thought about how I would balance that. The writing was very good, I understood Raymun pretty much straight away. It all comes from doing the right thing. The moment he feels like somebody’s doing something wrong he feels the need to step up and help, get behind Dunk mainly. All comes from the anger that boils through him, I feel like he felt comfortable opening up to Dunk.
Q: This show really feels more intimate, it really is a story of two people growing up together. How did you adapt this visual language, not just the writing?
IRA PARKER: Like everything in this show, it all comes back to Dunk and his POV. We don’t have that roving epic scale of going from family to family and the dead coming to kill mankind and dragons. We have one guy and some horses and a few nice trees. It was very important for us to feel earthy, to feel intimate came very easily because we are just following one person’s story, we’re seeing it through his eyes, trying to adhere pretty strictly to not going outside of that. For our visual language, we want the audience to feel everything that Duncan is feeling at that moment.
When he is watching those knights riding down each other in the lists, we want him to feel scared. When Dunk is laying down on the mud, we want to feel the grit under his fingernails. When he’s inside that helmet, we want to feel how heavy his breathing is, how hard his heart is beating. These are not comfortable moments. When he’s talking with Tanselle in the market we want to feel all of his awkwardness. But there’s only so much you can do with visual language, really, if it wasn’t for Peter coming in every day and communicating so much with his body language, his eyes and his own sense of humor. We never would have been able to get out Dunk’s inner monologue, which is so important to this series.
@Courtesy of HBO Max
Q: What was the biggest challenge in stepping into a character that is actually already written in people’s heads from 20 years or more?
DANIEL INGS: You can’t really think too much about it. Audiences, especially if they’re huge fans, can smell that if you’re trying to serve something other than the story. Ira has done such a wonderful job of bringing the books and all of the characters to life . All we had to do was learn our lines and smash it out, play it as best we could. We didn’t talk too much about what people might be expecting from it. You’ve got to be creative and get in there.
FINN BENNET: The most amazing thing about feeling the pressure fizzle away was that we had all of these pieces of the puzzle put in for us already. From George writing the character to Ira adapting the character, to Owen and Sarah directing us, to Lorna doing the costumes, and Pippa Nusile doing the wig. When you have all the pieces of the puzzle, you’re only asked to color in the final touches. It’s such a brave departure from the usual tone of Game of Thrones or The House of the Dragon: that takes a really solid captain, which we had in Ira. All I could do was put my trust in incredibly brilliant people, which I did. I felt proud to leave this out at the end of the day.
SHAUN THOMAS: One of my biggest challenges was trying to beat Dexter at 21, a game we used to always play on set. Dexter knew all the ins and outs of this game, I could never beat him. I think out of every game we played, I think I maybe won one game. That was about it. Let’s go.
PETER CLAFFEY: The pressure was very much there. It was in my head the entirety of the time to come into this world that I’d loved and respected anyway beforehand, but to come in in such a pivotal role was something that I’m still trying to adapt to. Just having such a great crew and such a cast get yourself through it.
Q: Anti-heroes seem to dominate today’s narrative in general. In this case, we talk about a real hero. Do we need heroes in today’s world? How much do we?
BERTIE CARVELL: This story is inviting us all to ask ourselves whether we can be a hero or what that would mean for us to imagine that one can do heroic deeds. Dunk dreams of doing heroic deeds, and then he’s reminded of his humanity, his mortality, his limitations. He looks around him and he sees knights who seem more capable and grander. That’s why it’s relatable, it is a heroic story because it’s grounded in something quite human and mortal. I think it would be good if we would all ask ourselves the question, what it would mean to be more heroic. People who do ordinary things are deeply heroic, actually. The most heroism you’ll see is in just ordinary lives, it doesn’t have to be something grand.
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