“All we really had to do was learn our lines and smash it out and play it as best we could,” Ings said.
1 of 2 | Peter Claffey (L) and Daniel Ings star in the “Game of Thrones” prequel, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” Photo courtesy of HBO
The Gentlemen alum Daniel Ings says he tried not to let reader expectations influence his portrayal of Ser Lyonel Baratheon in show-runner Ira Parker’s new Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
“You can’t really think too much about it,” the 41-year-old British actor said in a recent virtual press conference.
“Audiences, especially if they’re huge fans, can sort of smell if you’re trying to serve something other than the story,” Ings said.
“Ira lives and breathes this stuff and had done such a wonderful job of bringing the books to life and on all of the characters that it was there. All we really had to do was learn our lines and smash it out and play it as best we could. We didn’t talk too much about what people might be expecting from it.”
Airing Sunday nights on HBO, the six-episode fantasy drama is based on the Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas by George R.R. Martin, which take place about 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones.
The prequel follows an ambitious hedge knight named Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his precocious boy squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell).
Baratheon is one of the knights the unlikely friends meet as Dunk prepares to fight in his first tournament.
Ings said he thinks audiences will root for Dunk and Egg to make their ways through this dangerous medieval world.
“We almost misremember bits of George’s writing in the original Game of Thrones,” Ings noted.
“You have this kind of idea in your head of the bleakness because of these big set piece moments where there’s death and carnage and chaos and that’s what’s so fun about the writing is that you never know who’s going to survive,” Ings said.
“But I think there is a little gene of hope that exists in all of it and it’s really expanded upon here. Even in Game of Thrones, you’ve got this desire to see the Stark kids reunited. And I think here, in this one, it’s like you just want these two characters to survive. You know you want the other characters that they bump into and interact with to see that goodness in them.”
Martin recalled during a New York Comic Con panel discussion in October what it was like watching the cast and crew film the third HBO show set in his imaginary world of Westeros.
“I spent a few days there and they were having some jousts. They had a tug of war. And I got to meet the cast,” Martin said.
“It was pretty amazing and it was all really cool,” he added. “There’s nothing like that — to see somebody has only existed in your head, suddenly come to life.”
Martin said he didn’t think his Game of Thrones books would ever be filmed, so he made them as big, elaborate and complicated as the stories needed to be without any concern of what it would cost to recreate on the screen.
“It surprised me that one actually got made,” he said.
“And, then, Dunk and Egg came along a little later, a smaller thing for a series of anthologies that Robert Silverberg was editing. But that was a lot of fun, too,” Martin added.
“Sometimes writing is a struggle and sometimes it comes to you more easily than that. And the first Dunk and Egg — The Hedge Knight — came to me very, very quickly, and I loved it at the time I finished it. I thought, ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever done,’ and I still feel that way.”
