Most actors have a warm, endearing story about the moment they landed their big break – you know the sort. Tears, hugs, phone calls to parents, a quiet thank you to the heavens. Peter Claffey’s was not that. When he was told he had been cast as the lead in HBO’s new Game of Thrones spin-off, it took a while to sink in. He was standing in a costume fitting room in Belfast when his body finally caught up with the news. “I was pissing sweat,” the Irish actor says. “[I thought] my heart can’t actually beat any faster.” He raced to the bathroom and vomited so violently that it was almost comical. “I’m telling you, I’ve never thrown up as much in my entire life,” he says, comparing it to the scene in Team America: World Police where a puppet projectile-vomits for a minute straight. “It was a f***ing rollercoaster.”
It’s an apt enough origin story for a series like this: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, premiering on Sky Atlantic this week, is as gross and vomit-filled as Thrones has ever been. Before he joined the cast, Claffey had just a handful of small roles to his name (notably as the craic-less love interest Joe in Apple TV+’s acclaimed Irish comedy series Bad Sisters and opposite Cillian Murphy in the historical drama Small Things Like These). Now, he was being thrust into the centre of one of the most rabid fandoms in the world. Game of Thrones: when it comes to pop-cultural impact, there are few TV shows this century that can match HBO’s hit fantasy adaptation. In the new spin-off, set some 90 years before the events of Thrones and based on George RR Martin’s “Dunk and Egg” novellas, Claffey plays Ser Duncan the Tall – a soft-hearted hero who takes “Egg”, a wise, bald child played by Dexter Sol Ansell, as his squire.
