House of the Dragon co-creator explains A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms involvement

Before Ryan Condal would go on to co-create House of the Dragon with author George R.R. Martin, he had his eyes set on a different Game of Thrones story: Dunk and Egg.

HBO is now full steam ahead on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is based on Martin's novellas about Ser Duncan the Tall and his diminutive companion nicknamed Egg. Ira Parker is writing and executive producing the six-episode first season with Martin, but years earlier, Condal pitched himself for the gig.

"When HBO was looking to do spinoffs for the original series — this is now like eight years ago — word got around that I was a bit of a fan," Condal tells Entertainment Weekly. "They had me in and I passionately pitched them on doing Dunk and Egg for this reason."

The reason, he explains, surrounds his reading of the material as "a lone wolf and cub story told in this vast canvas."

Martin's novellas, known collectively as The Tales of Dunk and Egg, were published across 1998's The Hedge Knight, 2003's The Sworn Sword, and 2010's The Mystery Knight. It's basically A Knight's Tale in Westeros, beginning when a squire named Dunk takes the possessions of the newly deceased nomadic hedge knight that he serves, declares himself Ser Duncan the Tall, and tries to enter a tournament. These were the next stories Condal devoured after tearing through A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin's core series that inspired HBO's Game of Thrones.

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"Those always stuck with me as such a wonderful counterpoint to George's world, which was really about the upper crust of the 1 percent: the kings and the high lords and ladies who essentially waged the game of thrones at the expense of the small folk," Condal explains. "Well, Dunk and Egg is about the small folk who suffer at the hands of the game of thrones as it's played by the nobles."

That's essentially what Condal pitched to HBO at the time, but the network "wanted to do something much bigger and crazier and more expensive," he says. That, of course, led Condal to serving as showrunner and co-creator of House of the Dragon, the explosive saga about the civil war that tore down the Targaryen empire in a blaze of dragonfire. (Season 2 premieres June 16.)

By the time HBO came around to doing A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which now stars Peter Claffey as Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell as Egg, Condal recommended one of his House of the Dragon season 1 scribes taken the reins. That was Parker.

"Because I know Ira and because of my deep passion for the series, I said I would help out," he says. "So that's what I'm doing. I provide some Obi-Wan Kenobi advice from afar. I appear to Ira as a ghost every once in a while and counsel him. And that's really it. That's his show. He's doing a wonderful job with it. They have fantastic scripts that I'm very excited about, and it's all coming along. I think fans are going to be rewarded with another great series in the greater A Song of Ice and Fire."

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is scheduled to premiere on HBO and Max in 2026.

Read about House of the Dragon season 2 in EW's Summer TV Preview cover story.