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[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”]
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” has lots of things. Rousing, gory action. Meticulously stuffed trenchers of food among the set design. Fart jokes. But this show’s also got range. Find yourself a series that does a bombastic operatic flourish at its midseason cliffhanger (with actual opera) and drops Tennessee Ernie Ford in its season finale.
According to showrunner Ira Parker, the musical and tonal playfulness in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” all grows out of trying to find and honor the spirit of the show’s main character. Poor Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) might not want much to do with Targaryen princes, but he sure keeps Forest Gump-ing his way into dealing with them, particularly the stubborn youngest of the brood, Aegon, aka “Egg” (Dexter Sol Ansel), who hasn’t yet been fully corrupted like his noble siblings. Season 1 adapts the first of George R.R. Martin’s “Dunk and Egg” novellas, “The Hedge Knight,” with future seasons to adapt the other tales of Westeros’ tallest, truest, and sometimes most naive knight and his tiny bald squire, a Prince of Dragons.
“Obviously, because we are not this great epic fantasy about the dead coming to kill mankind and about dragons, the bigger orchestral score — that is one of the most beautiful scores ever done for television — didn’t feel right for us. We needed to get smaller and simpler, a little grittier, and what I really found with [composer] Dan Romer is that he also gave us this other element I had been searching for the whole time and unable to sort of put my finger on it,” Parker told IndieWire on the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast.
That element? Whimsy. Parker and his team wanted a sense of heart conveyed through the playful, tuneful, unpolished score. “The truth is that Dunk and Egg, it’s a story of two kids trekking out on their own,” Parker said. “We have a little bit of a Western aspect. There’s a lone wolf and cub sort of a thing. A guy with a couple of horses heads out to the frontier, goes into town, there’s a girl he likes and a bad guy, and he chooses pistols at dawn.”
The Western influence comes through in a lot of the whistling that Romer weaves into the score, and it’s worth paying attention to the moments that whistling is deployed — from the first montage of a young Dunk being corrected as a squire in Episode 1 to the pedantic title card correction of “A Knight of the Nine Kingdoms” in the Season 1 finale. “[The whistling] is so beautiful and exactly what I imagine the inside of Dunk’s head sounds like,” Parker said.
Rounding out Dunk’s internal music made soundtrack, Romer worked with Parker to finesse instruments or instrumentation that could have been used around this period. It is a fantasy show, but Parker told IndieWire that “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is kind of visually grounded in the 14th Century, and therefore did not want to be slinging around electric guitars and drum kits left and right.
“We try not to use a lot of flutes because I know [David Benioff and Dan Weiss] hated flutes,” Parker said. “Dan Romer is one of the most delightful people I’ve ever worked with, and such a genius and such a talent — and also, I’m pretty sure, like a trained opera singer as well, too. His ability to riff with you in the moment and give you different [takes] is incredible. It was very helpful for me.”
But the last track we hear in Season 1 isn’t a whistle solo or a mischievous mandolin. It is the song “Sixteen Tons,” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, which Parker told IndieWire might just as well be Dunk’s theme song. The choice to add that needle drop to the end of the episode (and a hilarious, jazzy interlude in the opening shot) is one that followed from the desire to use all the tools at the show’s disposal to create that sense of cheeky but heartfelt heroism that animates Dunk.
Parker and the creative team got the most positive sign they could to bring the cue into the episode, too. “I remember when I first showed it to George [R.R. Martin], he said that a good friend of his who had just passed, actually the ringtone that would come up on [Martin’s] phone for him was ‘Sixteen Tons,’” Parker said. “If there was ever any doubt about doing that, it vanished for us in that moment. I hope people enjoy it, and it means we just inch ‘Game of Thrones’ a little bit closer to something different. It’s morphing. It’s changing. I love that.”
Allowing for a little morphing and changing is maybe the key to “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” and why it feels so fun and alive, its characters original and well-realized, even though it takes place inside of a well-established chronology that will lead, eventually and inevitably, to Daenerys Targaryen’s sack of King’s Landing.
“‘Game of Thrones’ is one of the greatest series to ever come out. No one’s ever gonna be able to compete with that. You can’t even try to do the same thing again, you know?” Parker said. “Ryan [Condall] has done such an extraordinary job with ‘House of the Dragon’ taking a narrower focus but then expanding into territory everyone loves so much — with, honestly, I think some of the most polished, beautiful writing that’s been done in this world [of Westeros]. Dunk and Egg is the opposite of that. Dunk is so unpolished, as a human being.”
Even if Parker and his team had wanted to recapture the glory of “Game of Thrones,” the stories and the characters they’re working with, like a set of stubborn horses, lean hard in the opposite direction. The tone, fleet pacing, narrow focus, and sprightly music of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” follow those characters and are still evolving to suit where those characters are going next.
“I had a massive playlist for Season 1 that I constantly wrote to, and then I’ve actually found myself really not writing to anything for Season 2,” Parker said. “Every now and then, when you need to jolt yourself out of a funk, finding the exact right song with do that, and then you’ll just write all night. But for the most part, it’s silence — I don’t know if it’s a change in my writing style or just the needs of Season 2. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, you know? It’s a quieter season that has that dry, dusty, Western feel.”
With a more Western feel for Season 2’s adaptation of “The Sworn Sword,” we can hope more whistling is coming down the road with Dunk and Egg, too.
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is available to stream on HBO.
To hear Ira Parker’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch it at the video at the top of this page, or on IndieWire’s YouTube page.
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