Dunk’s big moments: actor talk
Peter Claffey — who plays Ser Duncan the Tall — says filming Dunk’s Trial of Seven speech was “nerve‑wracking,” but he laughed off nerves on the now‑viral ‘pooping’ scene, calling that sort of physical comedy something he enjoys. (wikiofthrones.com)(wikiofthrones.com) The show’s rising profile is also shining a light on other cast members — Daniel Ings is being linked in new casting roundups, and Claffey’s breaking visibility has carried into broader genre rumor pages. (screenrant.com)(scifinow.co.uk)
Peter Claffey is talking about two scenes that sit at opposite ends of the same job: one was a formal speech in the Trial of Seven, and the other was Dunk squatting by a tree in the premiere. Claffey said the speech left him “nerve-wracking” levels of pressure, while the bathroom gag was the kind of physical comedy he likes doing. That split tells you what HBO’s new Westeros show is trying to be. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiered on January 18, 2026 as a six-episode HBO series, and the network sold it as a smaller, more personal story than the palace-scale wars of Game of Thrones. The series starts with Dunk at his lowest point, not his most heroic one. Coverage of the premiere noted that Peter Claffey’s Ser Duncan the Tall is introduced in a “poop scene” almost immediately, which made the tone feel earthier and less mythic than earlier Westeros openings. Then the show asks the same actor to carry one of the story’s biggest ceremonial beats. The Trial of Seven is the kind of scene where one speech has to hold together honor, fear, class tension, and the fact that Dunk is still basically a very large nobody trying to sound like a knight. That range is part of why Claffey’s profile has moved so fast in 2026. Yahoo and IGN both picked up his recent comments about season two, which is already filming and adapting The Sworn Sword after the first season adapted The Hedge Knight. The attention is spreading to the rest of the cast too. Daniel Ings, who appears in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, was included this week in trade coverage of Apple TV’s new Juno Temple series The Husbands, alongside Joe Alwyn, Richard Gadd, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Joel Kinnaman, Bob Morley, and Fehinti Balogun. Claffey is now getting pulled into the rumor economy that starts once an actor breaks out in a franchise role. SciFiNow and other genre sites spent April 10 linking him to unconfirmed talk around Marvel’s X-Men reboot, with Beast named as the role in circulation. None of that rumor traffic means Marvel has cast him. It does show that one HBO season was enough to move Claffey from “new lead in a prequel” to “actor people now slot into every big fantasy and comic-book shortlist.” So the story here is not just that one actor was nervous about a speech and relaxed about a gag. It is that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has made room for both, and that mix is turning Peter Claffey’s most awkward scene and most serious scene into the same kind of career fuel.
