As you read this, I may very well be in the air on the way to SeriesFest in Denver, where I am told that yesterday’s surprise snow will have melted (it better!). It will be my first time at the event, but the 12th annual edition of SeriesFest, where a fascinating mix of network-backed shows and independent pilots will screen for an audience that will get an up-close look at the many, many different ways TV can be made today.
If you’re in Denver, you can catch me moderating conversations with The Testaments’ Amy Seimetz tonight, and with some of the team behind Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy on Saturday. I’ll also be part of the Independent Pilot Competition drama jury and trying to find delicious food in Denver when I’m not watching shows, so if you spot me, say hello!
In the meantime, I’m sharing my conversation with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms star Peter Claffey and showrunner Ira Parker, two of the people behind what I thought was one of the most delightful surprises on TV this year — this despite coming from a fictional world I thought we already knew very, very well.
Let’s travel to Westeros and find out how A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms managed to make the world of Game of Thrones feel brand new again.
Knight & Day
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms tells you what it is fairly early into the first episode of its compact six-episode first season on HBO. Having buried his elderly mentor by the side of the road, Dunk (played by Claffey) is working up the courage to pick up the man’s sword and pursue his own destiny as a knight. The familiar, booming theme song from Game of Thrones swells up in the background, and just as it seems like greatness awaits, the pressure of the moment churns Duncan’s stomach and… he goes to poop behind a tree.
Yes, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms announces itself with a childish joke — and not the last that will be part of this Game of Thrones spinoff series, based on a series of novellas from author George R.R. Martin. Though it’s competing in the drama category at the Emmys, it’s lighter, gentler, shorter and more delightful than anything we’ve seen from the world of Game of Thrones thus far — even when, in true Thrones fashion, it turns bloody and heartbreaking, too.
Parker, who created the series alongside Martin and was previously a writer on fellow Thrones spinoff series House of the Dragon, knew that even though his show was set in the same world of Westeros, it would have a completely different tone than anything that had come before. Working with his actors, he told me in a recent Zoom call, “They have to believe wholeheartedly that they’re in a Game of Thrones universe, but they’re meeting these ridiculous people and sort of organically finding these humorous moments too. I often found that there were so many opportunities when you have a serious situation that has an exclamation point at the end of something completely ridiculous.”
To pull off any of that comedy, as well as the drama that emerges as the season goes on, Parker had to find the Dunk, the tall and gentle would-be knight whose stubborn optimism disarms even the most cynical characters he meets. Claffey, a 29-year-old native of Ireland and former professional rugby player, says that as he navigated the usual insecurities of the audition process, Dunk’s bumbling moments helped him connect with Parker’s vision of Westeros.
“The awkwardness and the anxiety fuel Dunk and play into those comedic moments,” says Claffey, who joined Parker on our call. “That’s when I started to realize, okay, this is Game of Thrones, but it’s a different vibe for sure. It’s a mix that we’ve not really seen before.”
In the final stages of his audition, Claffey arrived for a callback and remembers seeing two competitors in the waiting room, one “incredibly handsome dude” and another who “looked like he could read Shakespeare coming out of his ears and eyeballs.” Realizing he’d need his own edge over the competition, Claffey cooked up a scheme that sounds very Dunk-like: “I went into the bathroom, and I had a little resistance band, so I was just trying to get as big a pump as I possibly could in my arms. I was like, surely that will do something towards it.”
“Did you really?” Parker replies, astonished. “I didn’t know that!”
Like so many of the comedy greats, Dunk eventually becomes part of a duo, teaming up with the young squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) to travel to a tournament as they both attempt to make their names in the world. Parker describes Ansell, who was 10 years old when the first season was filmed, as an “amazing dramatic actor” from the start, but credits the youngster for expanding his comedic chops as filming went on, especially as they returned to set to make season 2 earlier this year.
“He has matured so much in a comedic sense in the last two years — like he is making me piss laughing all the time this season coming around,” says Parker. Part of that comes from a deliberate comedy curriculum the young actor has been assigned, watching episodes of Arrested Development and “trying to teach a young boy about sarcasm.” If there are reaction shots of Egg in season 2 that are worthy of Michael Bluth, I suppose now we’ll know why.
Parker and Claffey were understandably cagey about talking too much about season 2, which went into production before the first season had even premiered. They’ve each found their own way to deal with the attention that comes from a hit TV show — “I canceled all my social media, Peter just posts his runs and workouts,” says Parker — and embrace the conversations with fans, which naturally happen a lot for Claffey, who at 6-foot-5-inches is bound to stand out in any crowd.
“It’s happened to me a handful of times, where they come up, and they’re like, ‘I don’t want a picture or anything, I just wanted to say this to you,’” Claffey tells me. “In 2026, when everybody’s just constantly getting selfies, when people do that, it’s like, wow. That’s a really poignant sort of thing to happen.”
They both hope, of course, that Thrones fans are just as happy with what they have in store for the second season. But anyone hoping they’d finally get around to the dragons or the massive battle sequences may wind up disappointed.
Says Parker, “Season 2 is another faithful adaptation of these novellas that we think are very well done. In all honesty, it’s actually probably a little bit of a more quiet, intimate story, if that’s even possible.” Adapted from the Martin novella The Sworn Sword, season 2 will find Dunk and Egg on more adventures, meeting new characters — “there have been some incredible performances so far,” Claffey raves of the new cast, which includes Lucy Boynton, Babou Ceesay and Peter Mullan — and staying true to the show’s lilting, gentle spirit.
As Parker puts it plainly, “We are going forward and telling the next story. We didn’t feel the need to stretch the story or to stretch the characters. We know who we are.”
He pauses for a moment, then continues. “Not really, but we pretend we do. Just like Dunk.”
Trailer Park
Two new summer movie trailers dropped this week, with wildly different scales and stories to tell, but both circling around, I think, a similar question: What else can this young star do?
There’s obviously a lot else going on in the first extended trailer for Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, from our first look at Charlize Theron as Circe to the reveal of the Trojan horse to Anne Hathaway’s fierce Penelope, but the true scene-stealer was Robert Pattinson as Antinous, seemingly the cockiest of Penelope’s many suitors. Honestly, he seems less interested in marrying Penelope than tormenting her and Odysseus’s son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, and yes, the jokes about shipping their characters have very much already begun.
Vulture’s Roxana Hadidi really said it best on X — “[Pattinson] should only take roles where he uses that jawline to bully younger teen idol actors” — but I’ll add how fascinating it is that Pattinson gets so much screentime in this very busy trailer, especially when his The Drama co-star Zendaya is somehow nowhere to be found! If you ask me, he’s also the scene-stealer of the trailer for Dune: Part Three despite not having any lines, and if you thought the American accents in The Odyssey trailer were odd, I can basically guarantee you Pattinson has another weird voice in store for Dune. Saying that Robert Pattinson is a great, versatile actor is not exactly surprising these days, but if he manages to walk away with both of his sprawling, star-studded blockbusters this year, that will be impressive even by his high standard.
Over on the opposite end of the budget spectrum and hopping on a ferry boat to Cape Cod, the trailer for A24’s Tony gave us our first look at The Holdovers breakout star Dominic Sessa playing a very young Anthony Bourdain. A biopic of someone whose life is already fairly well known — Bourdain wrote multiple memoirs, starred in multiple documentary TV shows and gave a ton of interviews before his death by suicide in 2018 — is always a tough proposition. Tony gets around most of those hurdles by focusing on a small, mostly unexplored part of Bourdain’s life, the summer he spent working in a kitchen and beginning his career as a chef. It’s basically a one crazy summer story in which the main character turns out to be Anthony Bourdain — not a bad premise at all!
Sessa’s career is in a very different place than Pattinson’s, of course. After stealing scenes from Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers, he’s only had one really significant role, in the truly underrated third Now You See Me film. The August release date for Tony suggests it might be less of an awards-season breakthrough than The Holdovers was, but it ought to be a great showcase for Sessa all the same. I’m not wild about the button at the end of the trailer — did we really need the main character to say his full name out loud? — but maintaining hope that the film itself, from BlackBerry and Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie director Matt Johnson, has more nuance in store.
