The weather was too rainy. Then too sunny. The ground was too muddy, then not muddy enough. Then came the wasps as HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was filming its climactic debut season jousting sequence across two weeks in Belfast in 2024. Fake blood syrup smeared across actors and stunt performers fighting in the mud attracted a swarm of the testy insects, stinging the actors’ faces while they were already exhausted and battling the elements and one another.
“By the end of it, they’d all been stung a bunch of times, but they were like, ‘Let’s just get on with it,’ ” recalls director Owen Harris.
When the team first approached adapting George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones prequel novella, The Hedge Knight, one particular challenge stood out, especially since the show’s budget was going to be quite modest by the standards of the franchise. The story follows an inexperienced knight named Dunk (Peter Claffey), who teams with a diminutive squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), to enter a jousting contest. But not only would the six-episode season require several jousting scenes, the season concludes with the “Trial of Seven” — two teams of seven jousters competing at the same time in a contest to decide Dunk’s fate.
