Interview with ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Co-Creator and Showrunner Ira Parker

Ira Parker first stepped into the world of Game of Thrones and Westeros as part of the writing team on the spin-off House of the Dragon during its first season. It wasn’t long before he was tapped to bring George R.R. Martin’s novellas starring Dunk and Egg starting with The Hedge Knight to life for HBO.

The six-episode A Knight of Seven Kingdoms premiered in January of 2026 and became a smash success, showing the world a different side of Martin’s bloody world. Set a full century before the events of Game of Thrones, it tells the tale of a Knight named Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell)—who is secretly one of the royal family, a Targaryen. Together, they form a close bond that forms the beating heart of the show until Egg’s brother, the hotheaded and bloodthirsty Prince Aerion (Finn Bennett) picks the wrong fight and the goodhearted Dunk intercedes. A trial to the death is called and Ser Duncan, a lowly hedge knight must prove his mettle.

The stakes are much lower than the other flagship series in the world of Westeros, but this show is no less thrilling. Parker has managed to capture lightning in a bottle with the casting of Dunk and Egg and is already hard at work writing his second season. He sat down with us here at Script magazine to talk about how he went about adapting this altogether different take on Martin’s magnum opus and bringing it to the screen.

Bryan Young: I’d like to start with how you started approaching the adaptation and how you take these novellas and break down a whole season out of it. It seems like you'd have the opposite problem that folks who are adapting other parts of Game of Thrones material would have.

Ira Parker: Certainly, flagship had, what, like 6000 pages to work with at the beginning and I think The Hedge Knight clocked in at around like 95, depending on which version you read. It was nice that HBO was still amenable to what we wanted to do for episode count and episode length, telling us that we could hit anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes and that it only had to be 6 episodes.

We knew we didn't have to stretch it. We basically just had to find where we were going to end every episode.

One of the biggest swings we took season one was, obviously, ending episode one with two kids laying on their backs, looking up at the stars when you consider that, episode one of Game of Thrones ended with a kid getting thrown out of a window.

That was the biggest litmus test for us.

If that would work, first of all, if HBO would sign on to have something like that… Obviously George [R.R. Martin] wrote the thing, so it felt like a natural stopping point for him and for us as well, it was just very much within the tone of the piece. Once they agreed to that, it actually became quite simple.

Episode two is Dunk mentally steeling himself for what's coming. Three is obviously our big twist that upends everything. Four, we always knew was gonna lead right up to the very beginning of the trial with the arrival of Baylor. Five, we knew was the trial, then six was going to be the aftermath. Episode six was tricky because we had definitely the least amount of material left at that point because in the novellas there's just nothing. Maekar (Sam Spruell) comes to Dunk the next day and says, “Take on Egg, as your squire,” and Dunk tells him no, I’ll take him on the road with me. And then the kid shows up the next morning.

We ended up using that as we turned it into three beats, a rejection, a negotiation, and finally... he shows up at the end, and we use that to frame our whole episode.

And I think it's good to have these aftermath episodes. It lets everybody settle back down, get their bearings again. It let’s us reset the relationship between Dunk and Egg. That was hugely important at the end. We want to know that even though everything has been flipped upside down, and he's never just going to be that stable boy again to Dunk, at the very end, we wanted to feel like that dynamic that we came to love throughout the season was still there with them. We wanted them to be able to have just a little bit of fun as they were riding off, a little back and forth again that says even though you are a prince and I'm a low born nothing of an orphan, it's still gonna be fun.

That was a big reason to have that send off in the end and add in that little bit there.

But honestly, the structure of the season fell together. It's almost like George wrote it as a six piece weekly. They all had their own flavor. It didn't felt feel like we were doing just one big long movie, each episode had its own idea. The first episode is Arlan dies, Dunk's father dies, and then he gets the squire, he gets the son, and so that circle continues.

Episode two is Ser Arlan and nobody remembers him. Dunk is getting really down, and then at the end, Dunk switches that, and he decides he’s going to use this to compel him forward. He’s going to show these motherfuckers who [Arlan] was, and what he's brought.

Every episode has its own little beginning and end, which started to feel like they each had their own life. They each have their own personality and obviously the tone changes so drastically. That was really important that people could feel the ins and outs of all these.

BY: As you're building some of that new material that's coming in, did you find that freeing? Or intimidating?

For example, like Graham Greene, when he talked about adapting his own material said he disliked adapting his longer material and it was a worse experience stripping things down, but when adapted things like The Fallen Idol from a short story, it felt easier because he could just expand it. But that was his own material, but when you're doing that with someone else's, does that feel intimidating, like bringing more things in there or having George R.R. Martin in the room or having access to him, does that make that feel less intimidating, as it were?

IP: This is certainly the fun part. It's not taken with lots of opportunities to fail and and to go wrong. And so we wanted to be very careful. We wanted to pay a lot of attention to the source material and let that drive our decisions for creation, to make sure that it always comes back to Dunk and where his head is at.

We tried to act as if George had written a novel instead of a novella. Where would he have naturally gone and then taking little morsels out and turning them into fully fleshed out characters and ideas.

One of my favorites is Robyn Rhysling, who, I think there's like one line about him before the trial and it’s that he prayed. And then we turn him into this warrior religious fanatic that would have been a great crusader. It was that one little line and we extrapolated, and so that becomes a lot of fun to do.

Obviously, a character like Lyonel Baratheon, who has two or three lines in the novella, but we know about his personality, there's prose written about that and what type of person laughs as they're charging down the lists to fucking kill somebody. Trying to figure out who that character is, is a lot of fun. You can't not enjoy yourself, and that's somebody who I think has a lot of joy for life and we wanted to see that early on. What is he like when he's not in front of a crowd?

We were really just adding character and world building. We were hanging out at a tournament. We were spending a little bit more time with Dunk and Egg, just making sure that relationship was as rock solid as possible before we upended everything and having them go and just be kids at a tournament.

It was a lot of fun and it was scary because you don't know if an audience is gonna go in for all that. This is Game of Thrones. People expect the dead coming to kill mankind and politics and and big moves and warring families and all this. And as we said, yes, kids getting thrown out of windows. But, you know, two guys sitting down and enjoying a sandwich is quite a universal feeling, you know, I think anyone sitting down to watch that episode with their pizza or whatever, felt like they were in good hands, they understood what’s going on here and how much joy is being brought to these two characters and what's important to them.

We just wanted to make sure that the show felt fun and kept it within the spirit of the novella.

BY: What was your writing process like? I read that you had a writing playlist and things like that. From a writing perspective, on the ground or at the keyboard, what was your process like?

IP: The same as it's been since I wrote my very first thing a while ago. I have a very dark, windowless, black setup where I have my computer in a pitch black room with every single ounce of light blocked out, and I sit there and I just go at it until it's done.

I actually really love that process. Sometimes there’s music involved, especially when I'm really stuck.

A good right piece of music just pops you out of it and makes you fucking feel something. Music's like cheating, especially when you drop some excellent song into the soundtrack.

You're just like, “I don't know how we're allowed to do this.”

No wonder it's all so fucking expensive.

When it's wrong and you're just writing languidly... sometimes you just gotta spend that time to find the piece that says what you're trying to say.

I'm trying to think what I used for season one. Probably a lot of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. You know, surprise, surprise. But it's different things for different scenes.

I love the writing process. Some people they enjoy having written, that is not the case for me. I could sit there for forever. That's where I'm happiest, just being alone and doing the work and making dialogue sound nice.

But it was a long process… I started when we were in LA. I had a couple kids in between. We moved to Belfast, and we started writing in London and then back to Belfast. I’m in Grand Canary right now. You have to find your own little spots everywhere you go. I wish I was a cafe writer because I've lived in some very beautiful areas, but I just can't do it. There’s just too much noise.

BY: Is there a scene or a moment that you struggled with in the writing process that came through the other end that you're particularly proud of how it ended up?

IP: The fighting. The fight in five was, obviously, we were being very faithful to the book. And then it was George's long time writer, colleague and, just general incredible person, Ti Mikkel—who is a writer on my staff, who's a writer on that episode as well—had said to me about a draft, “We just gotta fucking go for it. The book action is over too quickly and we really gotta make this something to behold.”

And we had a lot of reasons why we wanted to do that, but it really sort of set me free in that moment. We were quite prescriptive over what we wanted to happen to Dunk in there, but just it came out in one session, and that's how you know things are right. I don't think we ever touched it again after that.

That whole thing was lined up from beginning to end. That brutal struggle that he goes through. Is Dunk going to endure? Because I think you sort of know he's gonna live. So that was always our challenge, is that he's our sole POV. What's gonna happen? So it had to be about something else.

If the audience is asking the question is he going to live or die then we’re in trouble. It had to be about what he’s going to have to deal with in order to get through this trial. And I'm very proud of that episode.

The flashback as well too. It was a big struggle. We did so many different versions of that because, at the beginning, it was so big. I had him and all of his friends in there.

We had Rafe, but then there was also Pudding and Ferret, and they were running around Flea Bottom like City of God, tormenting the gold cloaks, running in and out of whorehouses. I think Pudding was getting thrown out of a second story window, and there was going to be this big vat of goop that they were going to turn on somebody just full of piss and shit and fucking vomit and all.

And then, of course, the financial realities of this show kick in, and it got really small and really tight, too much so, and it just didn't have any life. So we went back, we took one more shot at it.

I think we found a very nice balance of heart, but also that small, brutal claustrophobic world of beginning Dunk’s journey of endurance; the idea of Dunk, following Ser Arlan, not having a conversation with him, not asking to be a squire. Just literally one foot in front of the other, just seeing something that is interesting to him. Who is this person? Not even knowing what question to ask.

That ended up being one of my favorite sections of this, just that following, and that feeling. Ser Arlan, whether or not people picked up on this or not, had just lost his nephew, his squire, in the Battle of the Redgrass, and so he was not in a great place and he was drinking a lot and certainly in no mind to take on a new charge. So this kid starts following and he's just pretending like he's not there and poor Dunk is just sleeping out in the middle of fucking nowhere, freezing his ass off, drinking tainted water and just an inch before death.

And still, this guy goes and it's not until he wakes up hung over one morning, and he's fucking cut himself with his own knife, which I have to imagine as a Knight just would be the worst fucking feeling in the whole world. Like, what are you doing? And he just sits there and realizes in that moment, “Actually, you can't do this life by yourself. You need somebody else.” And there comes Dunk over that hill. He's pulled himself up from whatever deep pneumonia, fucking terribleness he had and he arrives and that's when Ser Arlan finally relents.

It was a similar story we had set up in episode one with Egg. All he did was just follow Dunk to Ashford. Dunk says, “No,” you know, “Fuck off. I don't need you, kid.” He's not ready to take somebody on, but that kid just continues on and he starts hanging up the clothes and cooking a fish.

The greater thematic story we wanted to tell with Dunk this season, which was that in order to win that fight in episode five was that he just had to keep getting up. He's not a very talented fighter. He certainly got the shit kicked out of him. He should, by all rights, lose this thing, but he's just not gonna stay down, just one foot in front of the other. You don't need a superpower, you don't need a name, you don't need money. Just keep moving forward and that's what he did again.

BY: Coming in as writer and showrunner, how did you see the evolution of the writing through each stage from breaking everything down to scripting it to actual pre-production, production, post-production?

How did you oversee the evolution of things as they went through and how much did things change from that writing perspective.

IP: A fair bit, apparently. The person who has always read my first draft since I was a young amateur who's not even in the business anymore who still reads them for me because he's just a good guy, told me that when he watched the first episode that he was blown away by how different it was from the pilot.

I hadn't even really thought about that, but a lot of stuff had changed. Honestly, unfortunately, a big part of it is budget stuff. It probably worked in our benefit this time because it allowed us to really focus the story and big interesting characters and pieces and scenes that I love just fell away because we didn't need them and everything that was necessary to tell this story is what remained.

It was very different than the first pilot, but it can't be that different because we had the bones. We had the skeleton structure from George. We were just packing on meat and taking it off and packing more on and taking it off and we did that a lot.

We did that a little bit in editing as well too.

I would say it's more re-crafting. It's re-crafting the scene in my head that I had already had cut and printed as I'm writing this thing, and now having to go back and put it all together with the jigsaw, which I love is actually my second favorite part of this process. It’s the editing.

But it changes a lot. In this case 98% for the better. Every now and then you make a sacrifice and you learn to live with something, and that's just the way it is, and you grit and bear it every time you see it on screen. It's one of those things about filmmaking that you can write anything you want to, but you still have to work with what you've captured on the day.

BY: Or what you can afford to capture?

IP: Yes.

BY: They say you learn by finishing things. As you got to the end of season one and it's out—not to ask you anything about season two that you can’t say—but as you get to the end of season one and you're looking at yourself as a writer, if you had to look at what you learned on season one that you can take into season 2 or what you did take into season 2, what would those lessons from a writing perspective be?

IP: There's a million different ways to do this. I would say you don't have to jump into the story too quickly. You can take some time to develop the characters and the relationships and build the world. It's ultimately gonna pay dividends later on. It's so important.

People get scared sometimes, myself included, that if you are too slow and nothing's really going on people just going to tune out. Just having a little bit of a fortitude to stay the path. Confidence is in short supply. Just trust your gut a little bit.

Writers are the most insecure creatures sometimes and it's always good to get to the end of the project and go, 'you could have done that a little more... you could have trusted yourself a little bit better.'

BY: But getting to the end of the project, is there anything when you got to the editing room that that worked even better than you expected when you got there based on the writing.

IP: Dunk and Egg’s relationship. I think it’s largely a function, not just of the writing, but of the work that Peter and Dexter put in outside of shooting. You see, as you're watching in the show, a relationship forming. That relationship was also happening off screen. They were getting to know each other. They were hanging out, they were going to Dave and Buster's, they were figuring out how to relate to each other. And that continues into season two, which I love, and it changes in a very fun way, as these close relationships do. We have almost like a little bit of an old married couple.

We also have the fact that Peter is just such a natural leader and took it upon himself to make everybody feel comfortable and make sure everybody was having a good time on this shoot. Which it was a hard one... it was a very rainy and very muddy thing. And we were outside for a lot of it, and he really set the tone and I think that comes across in everybody's performance as I watch some of the behind the scenes stuff that I had never seen before.

You can't write that, you don't even cast for that. We didn't call up his old rugby coach and ask how Peter is as a leader. I cast him because he is a great fucking actor and he looks the part and he won it, but this was just an extra bonus that immeasurably changed how season one is perceived.

BY: As you’re putting together the whole package and you've got all the moving parts going for all the episodes, how are you working to ensure that what you've done in the writers' room to keep everything thematically linked and to keep the themes of the the story and everything that came from the adaptation, how to keep all of that working properly through all of those changes and that evolution from your initial scripts to final version. Because ultimately, like that's part of the job as showrunner, right?

IP: Oh, of course. I would say just continuing to enlist the help of those who are there with you from the beginning; my producer, Sarah Bradshaw, my directors, Owen Harris, and Sarah Adina Smith, and people that you trust.  My partner, Sarah, had a huge hand in season one and read every single draft.

And just asking a lot of questions and being open to the response.

Same goes for the new people that come onto the project, for the editors who are coming in for the final act of this. Finding people with high emotional intelligence and just sitting there and having long discussions with them about the themes and what you're trying to accomplish.

What Dunk’s POV is supposed to be saying in a specific moment. You go over and over and over again, then you get into the technicals of it. Then you get into, “Well, how can we achieve that with what we have?”

But always starting from a place of character first. So then how can we tell that character story with the pieces that we have. That's the joy of the post-production process and it goes all the way through. It's not just obviously an editorial thing. Even when you're getting into the sound mix. So much of that is redone. Some of it's working and all of a sudden you realize that a couple lines that you had jammed in there don't quite feel natural and there's nothing you can do to get it right. You go back and you open up the cut again, and you try it, and you ask why isn't it working?

Those rooms have a lot of people in them and a lot of people whose job it isn't necessarily to work out the story and the character and the themes with me. But everybody is all pulling in the same direction. So when you open it up to those sort of questions, people will have responses.

You gotta listen. You don't have to. You don't want to take all the advice you hear. You would never get anything fucking done and you drive yourself crazy. But I do like talking it out. I do like that process and and asking a lot of questions and if anything, just to clarify it in my mind, maybe some of that is just a little insecure reassurance that I'm looking for at the end of the day.

BY: I really loved the way the show got structured leading up to episode five with the flashbacks. I think that was a choice that really built the tension and paid off the context. Like you needed the context. It almost felt like the Paris flashback in Casablanca to a degree, right?

Was there anxiety over the idea that maybe you'd be killing your momentum to go back in time in that moment?

IP: Oh, yeah. God, that’s why I hate flashbacks. For that exact reason, you know? I've always said if—forgive me Sopranos—The Sopranos can't do a dream sequence, or flashback well, then we're all fucked.

You just want to live in the present, you want things to matter in the present. So it really had to earn its place in this story. We had to do that in the writing process with HBO, we had to do that with George. And we had to do that again as we were finishing this whole thing and we were putting it all together.

I also sort of secretly knew that people would have to watch it because of where we put it. It's in the middle of the most interesting part. He's down. If we have to get this information out—and we do—that’s when people are not going to tune out. And I think ultimately it's worth it.

It's a little like hiding your vegetables for your kids inside something else. They have to eat their vegetables. But you want to do it in the way that provides the least crying and upsetness.

So, yes, I was worried, but that was also why, we did it so early on in the fight because I wanted, after we get back from it, to clear the palate and just ramp up all the way to the fucking end. You needed a big enough thrust into what is coming at the end of that episode for people to, even if they didn't fully immerse in that experience and were pissed at us for doing this, that they got enough by the end that they're just like, “OK, all is forgiven.”

BY: There are some choices that you all made that felt—and they would have to naturally come from the writing—that feel a little bit more, I don't want to say avant-garde, but for instance the parting shot with Ser Arlan taking his his exit. It's not something you'd see in any of the other Game of Thrones shows, and it feels more surreal, more artistic, than than some of the other stuff.

What kind of conversations were had about things like that and what that meaning might be? Because I find that stuff very interesting and very meaningful. But I can imagine there being some anxiety over how the average Game of Thrones viewer who's looking to just see people die in interesting ways might react to that.

IP: My god that was actually the very, very last thing that I wrote, was that Ser Arlan piece, and that was after we’d shot everything, and we were sitting there in editorial and the ending wasn't exactly right.

I just sat there on the couch and I don't know, that last little beat came to me. We were going back to do additional photography for Flea Bottom and we tacked that on and it's perfect and it's beautiful and it's exactly right and I can't believe that we didn't come to it earlier.

There is a balance... we're not looking to be avant-garde, but certainly there is an aspect of surreality and absurdism deeply baked within this writing across the board. And I would say the show, in its editing and its writing, is a little bit more conscious of itself. You don't want to be too much so, because it's not the type of show we're doing and we wanted to pay great respect to what has come before. But every time HBO does show, it should represent the artists in the day that it is being made in. Everybody gets to put it through their own processor.

And that's why these things continue to morph and feel a little bit different than before, you know?

We still shot season one quite classically. We're not punching you in the face, like a Guy Ritchie film. I love that and a lot of shows have ripped off that style to varying degrees of success. We knew we weren't going to do those things, although it would be super easy. We don’t, at the end of the day, because this is a fantasy. We need to be as authentic as possible, and I think David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] and Ryan [Condal] knew that in the, in the making of this that you really want the audience to be able to immerse first and foremost.

For us, that was always goal number one. Everything else we got to do was our version of deeper immersion of with this character of Dunk, really getting inside of his head, really getting the tone and the feel of these moments. One of my favorite things that we did in season one was the knighting of Raymun, that Sarah Adina Smith just absolutely knocked out of the park. I would say that's some of our more artistic leaning work.

And then, I think, maybe the only thing in this show that wasn't actually in the script was that shrug that she got Ser Arlan to do, and it's brilliant, and I fucking love it so much. I still don't know what to make of it, but I love that there's so many different interpretations of it that an audience can have, you know, ten different experiences with it.

I like little things like that. And as long as 95% of it is what people know and recognize, you can do little bits of things. You can if it doesn't change the story or the characters. It's just, if you like it, great. If you get it, great. If you don't, then we're already on to the next thing.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is currently streaming on HBO and is available in Blu-ray and 4K home video formats.

Season two is currently in production.

You can find out more about Bryan Young at his website.