If you’ve read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, you know one of its distinguishing characteristics is that the chapters switch perspectives, offering readers a chance to experience events through the eyes of many different characters. The author’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, by contrast, are very focused on Dunk. Dunk’s inner monologue propels the story, and his adventures are the sole focus. That’s something that showrunner Ira Parker wanted to make sure carried over into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
“Everything in this show … comes back to Dunk and his POV,” Parker said at a recent A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms press conference hosted by HBO and attended by io9. In contrast to Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, the other shows adapted from Martin’s Westeros books, “We don’t have that roving epic scale of going from family to family and the dead coming to kill mankind and dragons. We have one guy and some horses and a few nice trees.”
Parker continued. “To feel intimate came very easily because we are just following one person’s story, and we’re seeing it through his eyes and trying to adhere pretty strictly to not going outside of that. We don’t have any drone shots in the series … because it’s not Dunk’s POV. It’s not that we would never use something like that, but for our visual language, we want the audience to feel everything that Duncan is feeling at that moment.”
“And so, when he is watching those knights riding each other down in the lists, we want him to feel scared. We want to see those knights looking as impressive as possible. When Dunk is lying down on the mud, we want to feel the grit under his fingernails. When he’s inside that helmet, we want to feel how heavy his breathing is, how hard his heart is beating. These are not comfortable moments. When he’s talking with Tanselle in the market, we want to feel all of his awkwardness.”
Parker also had high praise for Peter Claffey, whose performance brings Dunk vividly from the page to the screen. “There’s only so much you can do with visual language, really,” Parker said. “If it wasn’t for Mr. Peter Claffey just coming in every day and communicating so much with his body language and his eyes and his own sense of humor, we never would have been able to get out Dunk’s inner monologue, which is, of course, so important to this series. It is so important to this novella.”
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms arrive Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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