Dexter Sol Ansell and Peter Claffey in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.Steffan Hill/Supplied
The Games of Thrones fantasy universe has long depicted its world as nasty and brutish – but one place where it’s diverged from the Hobbesian description is short.
However, that’s not the case with the new HBO series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiering in Canada on Crave this Sunday.
The TV show is not based on one of George R.R. Martin’s 1,000-page novels set in Westeros, but on the American author’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas.
It concerns a hedge knight named Dunk and his young squire Egg and most of the first season’s six episodes are half an hour. Its total running time is not much longer than a James Cameron movie.
Ira Parker, shown on set in Northern Ireland, is the showrunner for the Game of Thrones spin-off series.Steffan Hill/Supplied
“We wanted to make sure that we weren’t stretching, that we weren’t sending Ser Duncan out on any side quests just to fill time,” says Ira Parker, a veteran of the House of the Dragon writer’s room and the Canadian showrunner for the new series.
“It should feel like you’re reading the novella, but that we’ve filled out the world and we filled out the characters and we’re just having some fun,” he notes in a video interview from Belfast, where he’s in the middle of shooting an already greenlit second season.
Fun isn’t always a word associated with Game of Thrones either – but Martin’s stories of Dunk and Egg are often described as lighter in tone than his longer tomes.
The initial episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms are certainly comic – focusing on how the newly knighted Ser Duncan the Tall (Irish actor Peter Claffey) met a very short squire nicknamed Egg (the now 11-year-old British actor Dexter Sol Ansell) and the latter’s attempts to enter a jousting competition.
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There are plenty of scenes of the accurately, if anachronistically, named Dunk bumping his head on the tops of medieval entranceways – and him playing the dumb, but good-hearted half of a double act to the quick-witted and clever Egg.
“When I think back into the original Game of Thrones, I remember all the funny characters,” Parker recalls. “I remember Tyrion and I remember the relationship between the Hound and Arya, and Pod and Brienne. These are the parts that I love the most.”
Of course, Dunk’s path quite quickly crosses with those royals of House Targaryen – and, as Parker puts it, the show goes to the places that Martin takes all his stories.
“Hopefully we give people a nice on-ramp into Westeros,” Parker says of the show’s single POV and comedic start. “Hopefully, that’ll allow people who are maybe deterred by Game of Thrones’ perceived gore and seriousness to join us in this place.”
The spin-off centres around freshly knighted Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg.Steffan Hill/HBO/Crave
Parker, who grew up more of a sci-fi than fantasy guy, joined the world of Game of Thrones in a roundabout way.
Born in Niagara Falls and raised in St. Catharines, Ont., he got his bachelor of commerce at the University of Toronto before running away to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in screenwriting at the nearby Chapman University.
After graduating, Parker landed a job working on Rogue, a police drama that was a Canadian-British-American co-production and aired on the Movie Network and Movie Central in Canada. He describes this as essentially being in the right place at the right time – the writer’s room based in L.A. needing an entry-level writer with Canadian citizenship.
“I came on that show right at the very bottom and I left that show as a producer,” he says. “If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I’d have a career.”
Where Parker has made a name for himself has been in the world of comedy-drama. In Canada, he’s best known for Four in the Morning, a low-budget, edgy-for-the-CBC 2016 comedy-drama that chronicled the late-night antics of its four young protagonists.
While that show had a cultish following, it only lasted a season – but the pilot he wrote for it landed Parker a job in the writer’s room for the third season of Better Things, Pamela Adlon’s critically adored FX comedy-drama about a divorced mother and her three daughters.
That was, counterintuitively, the show that put him on the radar for House of the Dragon, the first Game of Thrones prequel. Hitting it off in a meeting with showrunner Ryan Condal, he ended up in its first prepandemic writer’s room despite not having a spec fantasy script.
“Ryan Condal is just a true writer’s writer – and spending time with him and just seeing his passion for this world and how he runs his whole operation was very inspiring to me,” Parker says, noting Condal’s advocacy for him played a big part in HBO hiring him to run the Dunk and Egg show.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – which takes place long after the events of The House of Dragon and about a 100 years before Game of Thrones begins – is a good fit for his sensibilities, being set in a feudal Westeros where magic is at an all-time low.
“I wouldn’t say it’s too far off from something like Better Things, where you’re telling simple relatable stories about people getting on with their life,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean A Knight is a family-friendly GoT as the young British actor playing Ansell – who was 9 when the show was shot – told one interviewer.
Parker won’t be showing it to any of his children – aged 4, 2 and, on the day of our interview, two days old – for a long time. “It gets pretty intense,” he says.