Showrunner Ira Parker said that casting Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell for the upcoming Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was the easiest choice he’s ever made.
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. 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.
Parker explained at a NYCC roundtable attended by GamesRadar+
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 novellas, which include three stories and have three seasons planned so far.
It follows Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey), a former squire who wants to become a great knight, and a young orphan boy named Egg (Ansell), who asks to be his squire.
Without giving away spoilers, Egg isn’t who he seems, and Dunk soon crosses paths with the Targaryen family.
Peter had done some really, really wonderful work on a Sharon Hogan show. 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.
Parker continued
Claffey was a rugby player for Galwegians RFC before starting his acting career in 2022. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is his first lead role in a TV series. Ansell, meanwhile, has been acting since age two. He played a young Coriolanus Snow in 2023’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes at age eight and filmed his first lead TV role at nine. At the NYCC panel, Claffey called Ansell “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 premieres on HBO Max on January 18, with House of the Dragon season 3 coming in 2026. For more, check out our guide to new TV shows and the latest on Winds of Winter.