Westeros has arrived at New York Comic Con 2025, and its HBO panel to celebrated by showcasing the upcoming Game of Thrones spinoff series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with showrunner Ira Parker, stars Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell, and its author, George R.R. Martin. Fans got a view of the first trailer, which offered a different less bloody side of fantasy landscape. After the trailer, the panel gave fans a deeper look into the new show that expands the Targaryen family tree and the Song and Fire universe.
Based off of the novella, The Hedge Knight, which is set 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones, the Targaryen dragons are all but extinct from the world, much to the relief of the local citizens who were terrorized enough. A knight named Ser Duncan the Tall, played by Claffey, is on a quest to honor his former hedge knight master by entering a jousting tournament at Ashford Meadow to earn some coin and respect. Known to all who cross hos path as Dunk, the massive knight is really a sweetheart once people to know him.
While Claffey was deeply invested in the new series, he knew he had to one thing to fully become the character: Horse riding. “Horse ride. I was not a big horse rider before the show. I had done a small bit. I had a brief stint on season 3 of Vikings: Valhalla where I played a very very rotten Viking. But I got to get a sort of a baseline horse riding experience in that. Then we worked in preparation for this show. We worked with the Devil’s Horsemen who did all the horse work, and they were just amazing and I got to a really really good level of horse riding with that. It was such a massive role and a massive world to come into.”
Despite George R.R. Martin writing over one hundred books, the Dunk and Egg series is perhaps his most enjoyable work he’s done and is enthused the show is the most faithful to his hard work. “I worked in television for like 10 years from the mid 80s to mid 90s, and at a certain point, I said, ‘I got to get back to books.’ And in those 10 years I worked in television, everything I wrote was always too big and too expensive. I was on the writing staff. I would write a second draft or a third draft, and it would be cheaper and smaller and all that. But after a decade of that, when I went back and I started Game of Thrones, I said, ‘The hell with that. I’m just going to write something as big as I can imagine and no one will ever film it because it’ll be monstrously too big and too expensive.’ So, I wrote Game of Thrones. And then to surprise me, that’s the one that actually got made.”
“Then Duncan came along a little later, a smaller thing for a series of anthologies that Robert Silverberg was editing. That was a lot of fun too. Sometimes writing is a struggle and sometimes it comes to you more easily than that. Duncan, Egg the Hedge Knight, came to me very very quickly and I loved it. When I finished, I said, ‘This is this is one of the best things I’ve ever done.’ And I still feel that way. I still feel these stories are some of the best I’ve ever done. Ira and his amazing team have done an amazing job of adapting that. And what you what you see is going to be very similar to what I wrote.”
Parker loved how gritty and grounded the series would be and it would focus more on the common people of King’s Landing rather than royalty and rulers. The show would solely be In Duncan’s point of view rather than being with multiple characters, including how different the tone is compared to previous shows, bringing groundedness and lightness to the characters.
“Everything had to feel simple and unpolished. Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon are so gorgeous, so beautiful, so sprawling and epic, especially in our musical choices. We went quite small and simple and almost whimsical. This is a story about Duncan Egg, about a knight and a squire, but in a lot of ways, these are still two kids going on this journey trying to make something better of themselves. There needed to be that adolescent feeling to the approach of the show where you’re not a finished product yet. You’re still learning. You’re still adapting. I hope people enjoy that. I hope people forgive us for the level of unpolished that we exhibit in this show. It is intentional and is inherent into these characters. We think it gives a nice cool new vibe to Westeros while still delivering what people know and love about this world,”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms airs on January 18, 2026 on HBO.
Discover more from The Koalition
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
