A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 may be at an end, but fortunately the team behind the series is already hard at work on the follow-up. Remember all those agonizing, multi-year waits between seasons of your favorite shows these past few years? Well not this time! Dunk (Peter Claffey) and Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) are gearing up to become an annual fixture on your television screen.
Season 2 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is adapting the second book in George R.R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg series, titled "The Sworn Sword." Unlike the first novella, this one doesn't take place at a tourney, or even at a beautiful, idyllic forest-scape like we saw in season 1. Instead, Dunk and Egg are going to find themselves smack dab in the middle of a terrible drought, helping negotiate a dispute between two noble houses who each lay claim to the river between their holdfasts.
All of the show's first season was filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and it evoked plenty of the natural beauty from the early seasons of Game of Thrones. Season 2 will continue to film interior shots there at Titanic Studios, but the production will have to range farther afield in order to film its outdoor drought scenes. We've know that was in the cards for a while, but now Parker has confirmed exactly where the show is headed: Spain.
Dunk and Egg are heading to Spain
“We are going to drier pastures in Spain for [the drought scenes],” Parker told IGN. “Except that the location that was meant to be our dry riverbed is now a fully flowing river after getting rain for the first time in ten years at this location, and so now has sent us scrambling and searching for changes at this late date.”
Just like Northern Ireland, Game of Thrones also did extensive filming in Spain over the years, primarily for locations like King's Landing. Given that the drought in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is far from the Crownlands, I'm hoping the prequel finds some brand new locations to utilize.
Parker says that the show's second season will be "pretty faithful to the book, again," and that similar to season 1, any "little flourishes" that are added will "all feel inherent to the world and to Dunk's POV." Given how well those additions worked out in season 1, I'm very inclined to trust him on that.
“Season 1 really is about fathers and sons and what's passed on to the next generation,” he added, while season 2 focuses more on themes of "loyalty and maybe against blind loyalty." If you've read the book, you know exactly what he's referring to.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 2 is a more complex production
Parker also dished a little bit on the behind-the-scenes workings for season 2, and how much it has surprised him. On paper, "The Sworn Sword" is a simpler story than "The Hedge Knight," thanks largely to the fact that it doesn't feature a big, expansive tourney. Instead it's a quieter, somewhat bleaker affair that sees Dunk and Egg travel back and forth between the two rival holdfasts, with some drama and action unfolding along the way.
That simpler conceit meant that Parker expected season 2 to actually be cheaper to produce than season 1. But that has very quickly turned out to not be the case — and not all for reasons you'd expect.
“Look, it's tricky because the money for Season 2 stayed the same as Season 1," Parker explained, "which really with inflation, means you have less. And then we're also a two country shoot now, which, there's a lot of dead money there. We also have, I would say, probably a lot more Egg. And he's actually probably our most expensive asset, because whenever we use him, you can't shoot a full day because of the child hours. And so it's funny, the things that cost you more money, because you're right. When I first thought about ‘The Sworn Sword,’ I thought, ‘Oh, this'll be great. We can actually do a Season 2, very small and contained and for a little amount of money.’ But it's actually been, in a lot of ways, trickier than Season 1, and I never thought I'd be sitting here saying that.”
It is kind of funny to think of more appearances from Egg being more expensive in the long haul, but hey, these are the hard decisions you have to make when you're creating TV I guess. Unlike Game of Thrones, which had a lot of flexibility for how to navigate its numerous POVs per episode, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is pretty much required to feature plenty of its leading duo. Given the off-the-charts chemistry between Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell, that can only be a good thing.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 2 is currently in the midst of filming. It's slated to debut on HBO sometime in 2027.