A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker says casting Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell in the upcoming Game of Thrones spin-off was the easiest decision he's ever had to make.
"Your casting director sends you all these auditions. They get thousands and thousands that they distill, and they send you 10 in a pack, then another 10," Parker explained at a NYCC roundtable attended by GamesRadar+. "Casting package number one, number one on the thing: Dexter Sol Ansel. Clicked on it, watched the audition, and [he's] perfect, great. So that was easy. And I remember saying to the casting director, OK, so what do we do? Do we just sign him up? Like, what should we do next?
"[The casting director said] 'I think we should go and we should meet other people and do this. And obviously, yes, we went and we did months of these processes and chemistry reads and everything, but to come all the way back to him...It just felt like it had to happen."
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (originally titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight) is based on George R.R. Martin's Dunk and Egg novella series (which consists of three novellas in total, with three seasons planned thus far). It follows the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey), a former squire determined to be a great knight, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young orphan boy named Egg (Ansell) who begs to be his squire. I won't spoil anything for you in case you aren't familiar with the story, but let's just say Egg isn't who he appears to be...and Dunk finds himself face to face with the Targaryen dynasty.
"Peter had done some really, really wonderful work on a Sharon Hogan show," Parker continued. "And not much else that I could see, but I remember what our casting director said about him is that because he was sort of fresh – he had just obviously come from being a professional rugby player. He said, 'Every single time I see him, he is just exponentially better than last time.' And that's sort of what you're betting on to a certain extent when you're searching for people who are unknowns. You just want somebody who you think is going to grow as quickly as you need them to grow."
Claffey was a rugby union player for Galwegians RFC before beginning his foray into acting in 2022. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms marks his first lead role in a television series. Ansell, on the other hand, has been acting since he was just two years old. He played a young Coriolanus Snow in 2023's The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes at age eight, and would film his first lead role in a television series at nine-years-old. During the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms panel at NYCC, Claffey referred to Ansell as "a 25-year-old in a nine-year-old's body."
"We brought Peter in, you know, three, four, five times maybe by the end of it. And every single time, it became so clear to all of us that he was our Dunk. And when we saw the two of them together for the final chemistry read, I was sitting there with our director, Owen Harris, and we just looked at each other and we're like, this is the show. It was easy. It was the least stressful decision we've ever had to make and hopefully we'll ever have to make."
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms hits HBO Max on January 18, with House of the Dragon season 3 also set for 2026. For more, check out our guide to new TV shows, as well as all the latest on Winds of Winter.
