Peter Claffey stars as Ser Duncan “Dunk” the Tall in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Steffan Hill/HBO The weather was too rainy. Then too sunny. The ground was too muddy, then not muddy enough. Then came the wasps as HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was filming its climactic debut season jousting sequence across two weeks in Belfast in 2024. Fake blood syrup smeared across actors and stunt performers fighting in the mud attracted a swarm of the testy insects, stinging the actors’ faces while they were already exhausted and battling the elements and one another.
“By the end of it, they’d all been stung a bunch of times, but they were like, ‘Let’s just get on with it,’ ” recalls director Owen Harris.
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When the team first approached adapting George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones prequel novella, The Hedge Knight, one particular challenge stood out, especially since the show’s budget was going to be quite modest by the standards of the franchise. The story follows an inexperienced knight named Dunk (Peter Claffey), who teams with a diminutive squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), to enter a jousting contest. But not only would the six-episode season require several jousting scenes, the season concludes with the “Trial of Seven” — two teams of seven jousters competing at the same time in a contest to decide Dunk’s fate.
“Your brain definitely explodes when you’re trying to put it together,” says Harris, whose credits include the Emmy-winning “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror. “Even when you’ve then established what the main fight is going to be, what it’s going to look like, you’ve still got six other fights taking place all around it that have to also work with whatever angle you’re shooting at. It’s levels of complexity. You go through it, bit by bit, chipping away and figuring it out.”
The production enlisted 20-year veteran second unit director and stunt coordinator Rob Inch, who not only helped create a jousting sequence in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, but worked at medieval theme parks coordinating jousts. Showrunner Ira Parker had an early mandate for Inch, Harris and the rest of the team.
“We weren’t just trying to do the best, most spectacular jousting — because everybody always wants to have the best stunts in every show — it was important that we felt it through Dunk’s eyes,” Parker says. “It’s Dunk’s dream to enter the lists and become a knight. It’s like a 12-year-old who wants to play in the NBA, then walks into Madison Square Garden for the first time and realizes, ‘These guys play for real.’ We had to be along for the ride with him.”
Inch began testing ways to pull off Parker’s vision a year before filming began. He deliberately didn’t watch the jousting scenes in the original Thrones or its other prequel, House of the Dragon, preferring for Knight to “live and breathe as itself and have my tone to it,” he says.
“When you look at jousting, it’s very one-dimensional — it’s just horses crossing,” Inch explains. “We wanted to find a way to get inside that action with the camera. We came up with a new wire cam device we could hang from a pole — so if the camera accidentally touched the riders, it wasn’t going to be this fatal blow when they’re doing a combined speed of 60 miles per hour.”
The camera rig allowed shots that flew through the field into a character’s point of view. “We went around figuring out these kinds of cool shots that hadn’t been done before, and a lot of those shots stayed in the show,” Inch says.
One of Harris’ favorites is a moment that resembles a scene where a driver of a car is abruptly broadsided by another car, except on horseback.
“We wanted to create that moment where you’re in Dunk’s helmet and the other horse is upon you before you even had a chance to realize where you are,” Harris says.
Finn Bennett as Prince Aerion “Brightflame” Targaryen. Steffan Hill/HBO Praising the execution, Parker adds, “The stunt team fucking delivered for us — they did some things that I’ve never seen before.”
Adding to the atmosphere was a layer of fog — both machine-generated on set and digital, which helped compensate for the ever-shifting Belfast weather — that ramped up the claustrophobia. “Instead of having these big, open valleys, everything wraps into where [Dunk] is,” Harris explains.
Wasp stings aside, Inch proudly points out that the sequence was captured without any serious injuries. Still, the threat hung over the production and resulted in Parker and Harris having to make some tough calls.
“I remember sitting on set, wanting to get another take, and [the stunt team] said, ‘Look, we can do it, but this stuff is really fucking dangerous,’ ” Parker recalls. “It becomes one of those points where you can’t just keep rolling until you have it just the way you want it. But that benefits us in a certain way because we’re the scrappy upstart, and the enemy of perfect, for us, is good.”
As such, unintended shots became part of the production process, with Inch filming seemingly mundane moments, like returning the horses to their starting lines. “Because horses are unpredictable, every now and then, something cool and unusual would happen, and that’s when you get golden stuff — happy accidents, as I call them,” he says.
The animals, of course, weren’t injured during filming, either. In fact, several of the most jaw-dropping moments use mechanical horses — which might come as a surprise, as many viewers likely assumed some of these shots were CG.
“Any time you see horses crash the railings, flip over or riders getting unhorsed, those were done with mechanical horses,” Inch explains.
Shaun Thomas’ Raymun Fossoway and Dunk during the Trial of Seven. Steffan Hill/HBO The production is now working on season two after having to pause filming in Spain in late March because of flooding from Storm Therese.
“We’re trying again to focus on what we love most about this show, which is the relationship between [Egg and Dunk],” Parker says. “We still haven’t gone balls to the wall in terms of action set pieces like on the original Game of Thrones. If anything, season two will maybe feel smaller and even more intimate than season one.”
Looking back, Parker’s favorite shot in the joust sequence wasn’t one of lances clashing on the field but when Dunk gets off his horse, takes off his helm and finally gains the upper hand on Prince Aeiron (Finn Bennett), beating him into submission.
“I was jumping up and down at how good it was,” Parker says. “I just couldn’t believe the ferocity with which Peter went for it. You could hear that sound of him crashing down on the shield of Aeiron’s stunt performer, Zach Roberts. That’s when I knew that this sequence was going to work very well for us.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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