‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ team breaks down tragic death in the Trial of Seven

This article contains spoilers from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 5, “In the Name of the Mother.”

The Trial of Seven is about to commence — a clash of mud, blood, and iron before a roaring crowd to determine the fate of the aspiring knight that dared to defend a lowly stage performer from a rampaging Targaryen prince.

On one side of the Belfast set of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Peter Claffey lines up as Ser Duncan the Tall with the champions defending his good name: Ser Lyonel “Laughing Storm” Baratheon (Daniel Ings), newly knighted Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas), Ser Humfrey Beesbury (Danny Collins), Ser Humfrey Hardyng (Ross Anderson), and a last-minute Hail Mary, Prince Baelor “Breakspear” Targaryen (Bertie Carvel). 

On the other side is Dunk’s accuser and chief tormenter, Prince Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett), flanked by the procession of his drunkard brother, Daeron (Henry Ashton); father Maekar (Sam Spruell); rotten apple Ser Steffon Fossoway (Edward Ashley); and three members of the Kingsguard, Ser Donnel of Duskendale (Bill Ward), Ser Roland Crakehall (Wade Briggs), and Ser Willem Wylde (not credited on the show; episodic director Owen Harris mentions a stunt performer plays Willem instead of an actor since there wasn’t a prominent story arc involving that character).

It’s only the second time in the history of Westeros that a Trial of Seven has been used to settle a score. Both squadrons stare each other down on horseback, in full armor and weaponry — looking like bonafide badasses of the Game of Thrones universe. And then…the wasps descend. 

It’s Bennett’s chief memory from filming the show’s first true battle sequence in episode 5. “We had these fruit baskets that were part of set dressing that, I guess, we didn’t replace. So we just had loads of rotting fruit around the set, and it seemed like every wasp in Belfast City traveled to our little patch,” the actor tells Entertainment Weekly. “I just remember wasps flying around everywhere. And the fake blood is made with a sugary syrup.”

Ira Parker, the co-creator and showrunner behind A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, confirms these pests were a genuine issue when filming this big set piece. “Not only on set, but in post[-production] too, when we had to f—ing remove them from people swatting at them,” he says. “They’re just buzzing around everybody’s head. If only they had been bees, I would’ve said that could have been Humfrey Beesbury’s contribution to this fight.” 

It wasn’t just the wasps. Diving deep into the making of the much-hyped Trial of Seven on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — including the bloody finish that claimed the life of one important character — key members of the cast and crew recall all the moving parts that went into the medieval mayhem.

“You got all that cool smoke, which makes it look badass. That thing is loud!” Ings says. “We had all these dialogue scenes where there’s like a ‘MAAAAA’ going on underneath.”

“You could imagine all those actors, all those stunt men, the props team. It was absolute carnage,” Thomas adds. “Yeah, it was crazy. Really was.”

The one thing that’s “gonna displease some people”

It’s true to the character of Dunk that our hero spends the first chunk of this battle passed out.

He charges into the fray, ready to test his might against the best of them, only to get knocked off the side of his horse with a blow to the head. Parker and the team decided “very early on,” he says, to begin the Trial of Seven with a flashback to Dunk’s life in Fleabottom and the tragedy around the death of his childhood friend. 

“I hate that I’ve had to do a flashback at this point when everybody just wants the battle, but we had to,” the showrunner says. “But I do think it stands on its own, and I do think it’s fun to see Dunk like that. I do think it adds a lot to the story, and it adds to the ending of episode 5 as well … But, yeah, it’s gonna displease some people.”

That’s what he said about some of the bolder choices for the TV adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s first Dunk and Egg novella, “The Hedge Knight,” including the opening bowel-evacuating sequence of the premiere episode. But fans have widely praised Parker’s vision and adherence to the source material.

Returning to the Dunk knockout bit, Harris agrees it’s “very authentically Dunk…In that moment, you sort of build the legend of Dunk, but at the same time, you also build the tension because everyone’s thinking, ‘What’s happened to Dunk?’”

“It is chaotic, and we embraced that early on”

Underneath a tent on the Belfast set was a large white board filled with cue cards, collectively breaking down beat by beat the entire Trial of Seven. It provided some much needed method to the madness.

“When you’re out there and you’re shooting it, mud is drying up on you because it happens to not be raining for the first time ever in Belfast and you have to get the fire hoses on it,” Parker remembers. “Plus, the wind changes and all of a sudden your mist coming in from one way is now blowing completely out, so you gotta go shift that all around. Plus you got stunt guys covered in fake sugar blood, which is attracting all the wasps. And meanwhile, you’re trying to get in there and get everything you had planned. It is chaotic, and we embraced that pretty early on.”

The way the team shot the Trial of Seven was aligned with the overall ethos of season 1. The same reason why Parker never told any of the story from the perspective of a royal (with the exception of one Egg moment while he’s posing as a street kid), this is Dunk’s story. “Although it’s a battle of seven, the battle that’s important to us is the one that Dunk’s fighting,” Harris remarks.

The shots oscillate between “helmet cam,” their phrase for the camera peering out from within Dunk’s helmet; Dunk wobbling through the battlefield as violence swirls around him; and the final one-on-one sword fight with Prince Aerion in the midst of it all.

“It just does something very interesting in terms of the claustrophobia of being under attack, being someone who is at the receiving end of someone that’s trying to kill him,” Harris continues. “And once you go inside that helm, as well as the sound effects, the breathing, the points of the increased heartbeat, you feel like you’re right in there with him.”

Ings describes the sequence as “a very well-oiled machine” with the cast serving as “a tiny little cog that gets fitted into that.” As he notes, “It is a lot about trying to pick the moments where you can really get the character across…There are people here in this seven-on-seven who are s—-ing themselves and terrified about what’s to come. Whereas for Lionel, this is the juice. This is what he waits for. This is his ’50-year storm’ — to casually drop in a Point Break reference.”

The actors give a lot of credit to their stunt doubles, but none more than Bennett. He says of his stuntman, Zach Roberts, “When I put that mask on, I couldn’t see anything out of it; the eye holes are tiny. He’s doing all of that blind. It was just filming it in sections, and then towards the end of the battle, that is actually me stumbling back into one of the shields there and he’s hitting me with the shield. We just rehearsed it a lot. Yeah, it was great. It was taxing, but I enjoyed it.”

For Ings, those scenes where they’re idling as a group, trying to look cool, were chaos in their own way. “We’re of course on horseback trying to get seven horses to stand and line up perfectly in a circle and all look badass while you’re doing it,” he recalls. “Someone’s just like going backwards and one horse wants to come and try and chew on someone else’s reins. I remember that was pretty tricky.”

The breaking of Baelor “Breakspear”

Over the course of press for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which primarily took place in January, Carvel fielded multiple questions about the parallels between Prince Baelor Targaryen and Sean Bean’s Lord of Winterfell, Ned Stark. While the actor didn’t look to other Game of Thrones characters for references, he feels the analogy holds strong.

Both hold justice and honor in high regard, and now both died in the pursuit of doing what’s right. 

“I suppose the difference is that there’s something about the way that the Stark family defines itself and its story around the kind of steadfast, stoic, responsive, moral responsibility,” Carvel muses. “‘Winter is coming.’ Whereas the Targaryens have different words. But there’s a correspondence there.”

Parker doesn’t necessarily buy into the comparison, despite his love for the character of Ned. 

“I would say Ned Stark was a little bit more naive than somebody like Baelor Targaryen was,” he says. “It’s not that Baelor doesn’t understand what could happen to him. In my mind, he’s doing this because it’s always been said about him that he is this person, from the time that he was the hammer and the anvil.”

“The hammer and the anvil” refers to the strategy Baelor (the hammer) and Maekar (the anvil) once used to win the largest battle of the First Blackfyre Rebellion, an earlier Targaryen-versus-Targaryen conflict in Westeros.

“At so young in his life, he became this war hero, this savior of the kingdom and the realm,” Parker continues. “Because of his nature, everybody’s telling him how honorable he is and how he’s gonna make the greatest king that Westeros has ever had since the Conqueror. And then finally a moment comes for him to actually put up when his honor is tested in truth. Virtue untested is no virtue at all.”

Reading these scripts for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms made Carvel realize how “thirsty” he was for a story about heroism. “It really made me cheer inwardly when I read it and wanted to make people feel the same thing when they see it,” he says. Leading up to the Trial of Seven, the character asks Dunk multiple times, “How good a knight are you?” Baelor then “must ask the same question of himself when push comes to shove,” Carvel adds.

In the end, Baelor succumbs to an injury to the back of the head he sustained from his own brother. Now the promised successor to the Iron Throne is dead, changing the course of Westeros history as Maekar becomes next in line. Teasing the finale episode, Spruell says they intentionally played with Maekar’s intentions.

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“We did slightly different versions of culpability, I guess; whether it was accident or whether he meant to kill his brother,” he explains. “I think that was really exciting for me to experiment with and to discuss with not only Ira, but Sarah [Adina Smith, director of episode 6]. There is that kind of deep, deep desire to be number one in Maekar that might be realized by the death of his brother. So all the guilt or all the sadness or all the grief he feels is kind of bracketed by this realization that this means he’s next in line to the throne.”

In Parker’s eyes, Baelor’s decision to enter the Trial of Seven and risk his own life says more about what’s needed to make the world of Westeros (and perhaps our own) a little bit better.

“He doesn’t make it out of this, but Dunk does,” the showrunner concludes. “As Dunk says in the next episode, ‘Maybe someday the realm will need my foot even more than a prince’s life.'”

He points to a scene from Game of Thrones, in which Jack Gleeson’s Joffrey Baratheon flips through the Book of Brothers, a dusty tome on famous knights. “As we see, Ser Duncan has four pages in that white book one day, you know?” Parker adds. “So he wasn’t completely wrong with what [Baelor’s] sacrifice was gonna be worth.”