News A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms How the Game of Thrones Song Set the Tone for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Showrunner Ira Parker and Dunk actor Peter Claffey talk about that needle drop (and what happens immediately after) By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on January 20, 2026 Credit: Steffan Hill/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Steffan Hill/HBO This post contains very mild spoilers from the beginning of A Knight of the Seven Kingdom’s first episode. The series premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now available on HBO for your viewing pleasure. If you’ve watched it, you know that the tone is different from the shows in the Game of Thrones universe that came before it. Our single point of view on the show is Dunk (Peter Claffey) a young hedge knight trying to find his way after his mentor (for lack of a better word) dies. A specific sequence early on in the episode makes clear that Seven Kingdoms, while being a story with heart, isn’t as serious as Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. In it, Dunk decides to head a tourney and win, gaining status as a knight. The iconic theme song from Game of Thrones swells in the background, but then there’s a hard cut to Dunk bareass behind a tree having explosive diarrhea. In a press conference for the show that Reactor attended, showrunner Ira Parker explained the genesis of that sequence. “This all comes back to character. That moment for Dunk, he’s at a crossroads and he’s picking up his master’s sword, and he hears that call to greatness. He hears the hero theme in his head, and the script was [originally] written, it said, ‘Here’s [Dunk’s] hero’s theme.’ “But when we went along through production, through post, and Dan Romer was composing Dunk’s hero theme, it was again a reflection of Dunk: So it was stripped down. It was simpler. It wasn’t that big, orchestral, wonderful heroic score. And so it didn’t feel exactly right in this moment, because this is a call to something that Dunk wants in the future. So he hears that theme, because that’s the greatest hero call that there is. And in the moment—he’s not a hero yet, he hasn’t accomplished anything—and all of a sudden, when he thinks about how daunting the task in front of him is going to be, it makes him nervous.” Credit: Steffan Hill/HBO That nervousness, Parker continued, made him queasy, so much so that “he finds himself squatting behind the tree in a very unheroic, some would say the least heroic position, because at this point, Dunk is not yet a hero.” Claffey added that it the scene was incredibly funny to shoot. “We closed the set and one of my really good friends in props, Gordo, was in front of me, and I’m holding a pipe in between my legs, and he’s just using it to cause this [poop] to come out. And he couldn’t look at me during the thing because he just couldn’t stop laughing.” Bertie Carvel, who plays Baelor Targaryen on the series, also shared what that scene—and the show—sets up: “It’s inviting us all to ask ourselves whether we can be a hero… Dunk, he, of course, dreams of as we all did as children, of doing heroic feats. And then we cut to him shitting behind a tree, and he’s reminded of his humanity, his mortality, his limitations, and so on. “And [later on,] he looks around him and he sees knights who seem more capable and grander. And that’s why it’s relatable. And I think that’s why it’s a heroic story, because it’s grounded in something quite humane and mortal. I think it would be good if we would all ask ourselves the question: What it would mean to be more heroic? And I think people all the time do things, ordinary things, that are deeply heroic.” The remaining five episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will drop weekly on HBO Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT. A second season of the series has already been greenlit, meaning we’ll see more of Dunk and Egg sometime in the future. [end-mark] The post How the <i>Game of Thrones</i> Song Set the Tone for <i>A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms</i> appeared first on Reactor.