An 11-year-old Dexter Sol Ansell is peering into his Zoom camera, hands pressed to his cheeks and mouth wide open in mock shock.
The young British star is, for The Hollywood Reporter‘s benefit, re-enacting his run-in with comedy legend Steve Carell at HBO Max’s U.K. launch party a couple of months ago. “I go around, I’m just saying hi to people, and people are saying hi. And then I walk around this corner, and there’s just Steve Carell on a chair.” (Cue aforementioned recreation of starstruck-ness.)
“I was like, ‘Should I say hi or should I not? I don’t know what to do!’ and Mummy went, ‘Oh, go on, just say hi,'” he explains. “So I creeped over, and then I went, ‘Hi,’ and he went, ‘Omg! I love you! You’re amazing!’ Steve Carell knows who I am? That was crazy.”
Crazy is an apt descriptor for what this kid’s life has looked like since his first audition (for U.K. soap Emmerdale, of all things) at age four. He has continued to impress in every project since, such as The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, where he played a young Coriolanus Snow, and later, in 2024’s mystery-horror The Moor.
But no one could have prepared themselves for the sheer talent — and striking maturity — with which Ansell co-led season one of Ira Parker’s triumphant Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. As the mischievous squire Egg (who would go on to reveal his true identity as Prince Aegon Targaryen), a smooth-headed Ansell shot to stardom upon its January release on HBO. Rave reviews ensued for him, Peter Claffey (as Ser Duncan the Tall), and the entire show. It was pegged as a light-hearted departure from the doom and gloom of Thrones and House of the Dragon, and the verdict was pretty unanimous: it worked.
