‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’: Egg’s Big Secret Explained by Dexter Sol Ansell & Peter Claffey

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 Episode 3.]

The Game of Thrones gore you’ve (maybe) been waiting for is starting in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Episode 3 gave a small glimpse of the gore ahead, and it will get bloodier from here. But the biggest moment of the episode came after Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) jumped to the defense of Tanselle “Too Tall” (Tanzyn Crawford), and then Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) came to his defense after that.

What book fans have long known has finally been revealed to all of the show-only viewers: Egg is not a random, poor child of Westeros. He’s Prince Aegon Targaryen, the youngest son of Prince Maekar Targaryen (Sam Spruell). Egg revealed his identity to stop his older brother, Aerion (Finn Bennett), from curbstombing Dunk in a tent at the Ashford tournament. His other brothers are Daeron “the Drunken” (Henry Ashton), seen in this spinoff, and Maester Aemon of the Night’s Watch (Peter Vaughan) from Game of Thrones. (See here for a full breakdown of the Targaryen family tree.)

Dunk attacked Aerion after Aerion snapped Tanselle’s finger in half. Her crime: putting on a puppet show that depicted the slaying of a dragon. Aerion deemed it treasonous, and he and his men attacked the performers as punishment. Dunk didn’t hesitate to fight for Tanselle and against Aerion’s brutality because it was the right thing to do, Claffey tells TV Insider. He wasn’t thinking of setting a good example of bravery and nobility to Egg, but that will certainly be a byproduct.

Steffan Hill / HBO

“I don’t think he’s thinking too much about setting an example for Egg in that moment,” Claffey explains. “I think it’s just completely the thought of a prince of the realm who’s also, of course, a knighted prince of the realm, breaking a woman’s finger on that stage is just completely alien to him. And Dunk has a fuse. He has good control over himself, but if something’s going very against his morals and his values, he’s not…”

“Your whole life, you were with Ser Arlan [Danny Webb],” Ansell chimes in about Dunk. “You’re not in that world. You’re in a separate, quieter world, and then you come into this, and it’s all totally different.”

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“Totally,” Claffey replies. “And Ser Arlan was quite big on the values of a knight. And obviously, chivalry is one of the main things that you think of when you think of a knight. Just to see somebody doing that just completely set him off. So, I don’t know if he’s thinking about setting an example, but he’s just immediately acting on values and instinct, I imagine, as I hope we all would.”

Before this, Dunk was always switching between being stern and sweet with Egg. He was following Ser Arlan’s lead in that regard, Claffey says, but “if he knew who [Egg] was, he’d never be saying a word like that.”

“I think Egg maybe finds it refreshing, the fact that this knight from the dirt roads of nowhere is talking to him quite sternly,” Claffey explains. Ansell agrees.

“That’s also why he doesn’t say who he is first and waits,” Ansell says. “He doesn’t really want to say, to be honest, but then he has to.”

This sets the stage for the first trial of seven in 100 years in Westeros. Brace yourselves for the season’s second half.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Sundays, 10/9c, HBO