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‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Showrunner Ira Parker Says George R.R. Martin Has “Only Been a Benefit” While Filming Season 2
[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.]In the season finale of the HBO series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, set in Westeros a century before the events of Game of Thrones, hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) was left wondering just what his responsibilities toward his squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) should be. The aftermath of the Trial of Seven and the death of Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel) make Dunk reflect on his own regret and guilt, unsure of what to do and where to go next. When Dunk ultimately decides to take Egg back, it’s on the condition of continuing to travel as a hedge knight and getting as far away from royalty as possible.
While there is a sense of closure to the story being told over the six-episode first season, there’s also a sense of adventure to come. Already deep into production on Season 2, showrunner Ira Parker is continuing to work with the source material, following The Sworn Sword while also getting feedback from George R.R. Martin as he adds his own touches to the adventures of Dunk and Egg.
Collider recently got the opportunity to chat one-on-one with Parker about the events of the finale, poking fun at the need to rename the series A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms now (and no, the title is not actually changing), that reunion between Dunk and Sweetfoot, how that final shot with Ser Arlan riding off as Dunk and Egg go on their way came about, whether Dunk was ever really knighted, the change in dynamic between Dunk and Rafe from what was in the book, the nod to Brienne of Tarth, and the reveal that Egg lied again so that he could rejoin Dunk. Parker also talked about how far into the Season 2 production they are, whether any Season 1 cast members will show up in Dunk and Egg’s world again, the possibility of continuing beyond Season 3, and how they handle any potential changes that might need to be made.
Collider: It’s fun to see a show that feels so different from the other shows in this world, and yet still looks like it fits in this world.
IRA PARKER: I’m glad it still looks like it fits in this world. That was what made us the most nervous. One of our actor’s agents almost didn’t let them be in it because he said, “We don’t know how you’re going to make this look okay for the money that they’re giving you.” They took those words back by the end. I’m glad that this is the result.
No, the Series Will Not Be Renamed ‘A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms’
“We’re just having some fun in Westeros.”
So, do you have to rename the series now to A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms, or were you just having fun with the title card at the end of the finale?
PARKER: I think that’s probably what it was. We try not to take ourselves too seriously. We’re serious when it’s appropriate. We’re just having some fun in Westeros.
It was nice to have that little bit of humor again, after some of the heavier stuff in the last couple episodes.
PARKER: It was important to have that last little conversation between them to cleanse the palate a little bit. So much stuff has come to pass between the two of them in both of their lives, and we just needed to let the audience know, “Don’t worry, going forward, this will still be the Dunk and Egg that we all grew to know and love even before we turned that relationship upside down.
I also have to give you kudos for taking the time to reunite Dunk with Sweetfoot, the horse. Why was it important for you to find the time for that moment when that’s not something that you had to do?
PARKER: We all felt, pretty early on, that a lot of people, including us, were going to care only if Dunk got reunited with that horse. If he wins the tournament, fine. The Trial of Seven, great, we want him to live. But the horse, that was a hard seed to watch. Obviously, Dunk has a great affinity for his animals, so we felt that it was appropriate to at least address that. And he’s going to an apple farm. What could be better? It’s like horsey heaven.
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I thought there was something really beautiful about seeing Ser Arlan on Sweetfoot, heading off in another direction from Dunk and Egg. It’s far away, but I thought I saw Dunk turn and look in his direction. Did that happen? Was that moment more emotional than you expected, because it made me very emotional?
PARKER: I’m glad. That was the very last thing that I wrote for this show. It wasn’t actually in the original script, and when we were cutting all the things together, our ending didn’t feel quite right. I forget exactly when or how that came up. We were very lucky when we went back to do some of the re-shoots. We very quickly went and grabbed that, and I’m really glad that we did. First of all, Dunk is looking. There is just a little bit of something there. It’s perfect because your response is exactly what I wanted. Is he looking? Is he not? Was that on purpose? Was it not? We’re sending Ser Arlan off on his way. Ser Arlan has done his job and remained present with Dunk even after he died, but now Dunk is setting off to become his own mentor.
Well, thank you for confirming and clarifying.
PARKER: You have an eagle eye. I appreciate you picking that out.
I’ve really enjoyed watching Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell work together this season. They’re so different, but they also work so well together. They’ve been a fun odd couple/buddy comedy duo. What has most surprised you about watching them together? When there’s no way you could have known if they would work until you saw them together, was there a moment that just gave you a sigh of relief?
PARKER: In the audition, they related to each other very well physically. How do you quantify that? There was just a certain natural familiarity that they always had. They both went out of their way to forge a relationship off-screen as well, hoping that would translate to more ease and more chemistry on screen, and it worked. Those guys off-screen are exactly like the pair that they are on-screen. They needle each other, but in a brotherly way. I don’t think the mentorship is bottom up the way it is in the show. It’s more classic in real life. But there’s still a lot of back and forth, which I really appreciate. They’re just two very delightful people. George [R.R. Martin] knows what he’s doing. Those odd couple pairings he creates are like none other. We’re very happy to have Peter and Dex bringing them to life, but a lot of that comes from the source material.
Did Dunk Ever Really Get Knighted by Ser Arlan in ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’?
“The whole journey is going to be about what makes a true knight.”
There’s a moment in the finale flashback when Dunk reveals that he wasn’t knighted by Ser Arlan. Why did you want to make that clear?
PARKER: It’s fascinating to me that that’s what you got out of that scene. At that moment, Dunk had never been knighted by Ser Arlan. He says, “Why did you never knight me?” And then, Ser Arlan dies, and we think it’s over. But then, he’s back and, as far as we know, the continuation of that scene is, “Boy, go get me my sword,” and then he knights him. There is no conformation, one way or the other, coming out of that scene. That’s exactly how Mr. R.R. Martin requested it. It remains [ambiguous] and people can decide for themselves. Look, Danny Webb is a fucking magician. I love him so much. He’s just become Arlan. It could have been no one else in this whole world. He was just pitch perfect, all the way up until his death. This whole journey is going to be about what makes a true knight, whether or not you’re given the title, or if you have to earn the title even after you’re given it. Can you earn it, even if you’ve never been given it?
It feels like, for someone like Dunk, it’s also very much a confidence issue because even if he really has the title, it’s not something he feels that he deserves or is worthy of.
PARKER: Yep. What person doesn’t feel that way, even deep into their careers and even successfully deep into their careers, that they’re not complete frauds and undeserving of any little morsel of praise or success that they receive. Honestly – spoiler alert, except I guess people know from the original series – even when he is more successful in his career than he is now and at quite high levels, as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, he’s still feeling that way. He’s still feeling insecure because there’s always new levels of a job. No one ever lets you stay at the same place for your whole life. As soon as you do a good job, they want you to do something that’s out of your comfort zone. And so, you can remain anxious and feeling unworthy for your entire career.
The ‘Game of Thrones’ spin-off star goes deep on that surprise twist at the end of the penultimate episode.
Was there ever a version of The Trial of Seven that showed Maekar attacking Baelor? Did you always want that to be something that you held for the end of the episode?
PARKER: We always knew that because of the nature of the novella that is completely told from Dunk’s POV, that our show would follow that quite closely. We’re almost religiously in Dunk’s POV, breaking only a few times for Egg, but no one else. In that Trial of Seven, we wanted to keep it between Dunk and who he was fighting in that moment. That’s not to say we don’t see other little bits of that fight, but we do through Dunk’s perspective and Dunk’s story. When Aerion says on the ground to him very softly, “I yield, it’s over,” Dunk knows it’s over, but people are still fighting. There are still battles to the death going on and Dunk thinks, “I have to get this information out.”
It’s like those war movies when the war is over, but you still feel even more tense now because, what if somebody you love dies after the war is over and they didn’t have to? He sees these brutal fights going on. You see Maekar turning around with his flail and Baelor is still fighting with him. You see the Fossoways going at it, which is one of my favorite ones, and Dunk says, “I need to get this guy to the fucking front and end this thing right now,” and literally drags him there. So, we were always, no matter what, going to show it through Dunk’s POV. That moment at the end had to come through Dunk again. He’s just been given maybe everything he wants. He finally got through it, and maybe now he’s going to be Baelor’s guy. But as George so often does, it was not exactly meant to be that way.
Why did you decide to change Dunk’s childhood friend, Rafe, into a girl and add a bit of romantic interest to it? Did something about that relationship feel important?
PARKER: Is it 100% confirmed that Rafe was a boy?
No, it wasn’t.
PARKER: More than anything else in Dunk’s life, the fact that he was an orphan with no family probably weighs the heaviest and informs most of his decisions. Just that search for family, that search for a mother and somebody to take care of you, which he never had, is very at the core of what it is to be a lonely kid out there, trying to do better. I think Rafe fills that gap in some ways. Not in all ways. Dunk does this thing where he tries to see the very best in everyone because he really wants that family, even when it’s not quite right. I’m still not completely convinced that Rafe isn’t using him a little bit because he’s big and he’s strong, and he doesn’t seem to be that smart, so she can manipulate him. She’s not a bad person. That’s just what she has to do to get by. Dunk is quite earnest. He wears his emotions at the front. It makes you hope for good things.
Rafe is a very interesting relationship in Dunk’s life. At one point, we were going to have all of his little friends. We were going to have Rafe and Ferret and Pudding all in the mix. Of course, our budget necessities brought that all down to what we could accomplish. It originally started off as City of God in Westeros, and then it got paired down a little bit. Rafe, ultimately, was the most important of all those friendships. When a kid that age says, “I love you,” what does it really mean? What is he really saying? I’m not sure it’s romantic love, even though maybe it feels that way because they’re close in age and they only have each other. What is love? Feeling safe and protected and reassured, and somebody you can trust and rely on. Rafe probably qualifies to check off a bunch of those things, and I think a mother probably does the same. I think it was written in the script somewhere that Dunk looks at her like she’s his mother, sister, best friend and wife, all wrapped into one. He’s heaping a lot of things into that moment.
‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Showrunner Ira Parker Says That Moment Connecting Dunk and Brienne of Tarth Came Up During Reshoots
“It just seemed perfect.”
You also have a subtle moment connecting Dunk and Brienne of Tarth, and I love that you not only did that, but also shot at the same location. How did all of that come about? Was that something you had always wanted to include? Did that come up later?
PARKER: That came up later. That actually came up in our reshoots. That was a scene that we had early on, that came out for budget reasons but then went back in due to cutting too deeply. We were looking for the original, original spot where they did the very first of those walks, but those trees had become a bit of a Belfast landmark and had actually been destroyed a little bit, just by all the tourism. And so, even the original series had to go, in Season 3 or 4 for the Brienne and Pod walk, had to go to a different spot that looked a lot like it and use that because they couldn’t use the original. So, we went to that one. It just seemed perfect. I loved it when I found out that we could get there and do that. That’s exactly the vibe that we were going for. I love that image of the trees touching over the street. There’s something that feels very special to me about Dunk and his great, great, great-granddaughter, whoever it is, walking along the same road. I think Season 1 is a lot about what we pass down to the next generation. We have father to son. We have knight to squire. We have master to apprentice. And so, it felt very within our motifs or themes for the season.
The ‘Game of Thrones’ series is not told chronologically.
We learn that Egg seems to be disobeying a bit again by venturing off with Dunk. How will that affect things for Egg and his family moving forward? Is Dunk ever going to get so fed up with this kid lying to him?
PARKER: We’ve tried a bunch of different versions for Season 2, big and small. It’s not actually even determined yet where we’re going to land on that. It will come back up again. It was initially meant as just a bit of a joke, but then people started telling me afterwards that, “No, it’s a huge cliffhanger, man. You have to go and address this.” And I was just like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. I suppose.” I don’t want it to distract from the main story they were telling in Season 2. That is the only goal. We don’t want to create an alternate timeline. In the book, it felt fair game to me because it’s actually never explicitly drawn that Maekar says, “Okay, my son can go squire for you.” They’re talking about it and Dunk makes a good point, but then Maekar just walks off, and a few moments later, Egg shows up. Maybe Egg was just hiding in the bushes. Maybe Egg followed his father there, and his father was going back to the castle to say, “Let’s fucking get out of here.” And then, Egg is like, “Hey, Ser, I’m allowed to come with you.” It created a little gap there. It was ambiguous enough that we didn’t feel like we were contradicting anything that had been written down. The after effects of this could potentially do that, so we were trying to be very careful.
How many of the Targaryens that we saw this season will crossover to the second season? And really, how much of the cast, in general, will we see again?
PARKER: Every book is a brand-new cast of people. George has a plan for later novellas, where certain people would come back in. We’ll see how it goes. It’s going to be, if any, quite light. There might not be any. We’re exploring. If it feels right, if it feels fun, if it adds something to it while not taking away from everything that we’re trying to do with The Sworn Sword, then it could happen.
Production of ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Season 2 Is Moving Right Along
“We’re doing some really cool stuff.”
How are things going with Season 2? Where are you at in the process of it all?
PARKER: We are pretty deep into shooting now. We’re seeing some scenes get cut together. I’m still writing a little bit and still tweaking here and there. But everything is going very well. I love our cast this season. I think we’re doing some really cool stuff, and some very different stuff than we did in Season 1. We’ll see. You never know until it’s out there.
You’ve said that Season 2 would also be six episodes. Has it felt challenging to tell the story with just six episodes that are at 40 minutes or less, or has it felt like a good amount because you really can pack the episodes with a lot of story?
PARKER: It is challenging to tell a drama episode in that amount of time, setting up the stakes, telling a full story, and closing it off. However, I will say it’s fortunate for us that, because we are a single POV show, it’s not like we have to manage multiple storylines in every single episode. This feels like the perfect amount for us. It never felt like we were straining or trying to fill time. We were just having fun. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we actually ended up cutting down a lot of stuff because it didn’t work or we didn’t need it or it slowed things down. I’m very grateful that HBO gave us such a wide breadth to deliver an episode in. The truth is, if an episode had come in at one full hour and it was just a banger, then it would have gone out like that. But between 35 and 40 minutes seems to really be our sweet spot.
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Do you have plans to go beyond three seasons? Have you discussed that with George R.R. Martin at all, with him still writing and things not being done? Are you worried about the Game of Thrones problem of running out of source material? How do you feel about that?
PARKER: Certainly, I’ve talked to George a lot about this, and he’s given me a bunch of paragraphs and synopses of 10 to 12 more of these – I forget and need to count them up again – to take them all the way through their whole lives, which is very exciting. And there’s a lot of really cool stuff in there. Because we actually already know all the moments that happen, because this is in the past from A Song of Ice and Fire, there’s no danger of big events being done uncanononically. Honestly, we know their fates, or George knows their fates, and we know major events that happen within their lives, we know battles that they fought in, and we know people that came in and out of their world, marriages, and deaths, and all these things. So, we actually have a fair bit to work with. We have, essentially, a finished timeline. But we’ll see. We’ll see how this first season wraps up. If people stick with us into the second season, we’ll go from there. It’s a lot of fun to write these characters.
Everything Showrunner Ira Parker Is Doing in ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Is Guided by the Stories of George R.R. Martin
“We never change the story.”
Are there changes that you’ve already needed to make to material for the second book to do Season 2? Do you make those changes and then go to George R.R. Martin, or do you have to ask him about that stuff before you write it? How does that work?
PARKER: George gets sent every draft of the script, and he’s only been a benefit to the series. That’s all we want, his input. Every now and then, little things have to change, but we never change the story. The beginning is the beginning, the middle is the middle, and the end is the end. We just fill out the world and fill out the characters, and we try to do it in a way that feels seamless and that feels like he would have done it if he had written them as novels instead of novellas. Sometimes we get it wrong, but for the most part, so far, so good. We’ll see where Season 2 comes out. It’s been a joy writing in this world. Just getting to do the fun scenes and having a strong story laid down in front of you that works, what more could you hope for with a big TV series like this? It’s a story that people love. It’s quite a classic tale that can reach a lot of people. We just get to give a different bit of flavor, a little bit of a different tone, and a little bit of a different side of Westeros. We’ll see if people continue to follow us on this journey or not.
- Release Date
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January 18, 2026
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Ira Parker
- Directors
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Owen Harris
- Writers
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George R. R. Martin, Ira Parker
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Peter Claffey
Ser Duncan ‘Dunk’ the Tall
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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms airs on HBO and is available to stream on HBO Max.