‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Stars on Filming That Prison Scene (VIDEO)

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 Episode 4.]

Egg’s (Dexter Sol Ansell) identity was revealed to save Dunk’s (Peter Claffey) life in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 3. In Episode 4, they laid all their cards out on the table in Dunk’s prison cell while the hedge knight awaited his fate. Claffey and Ansell share what it was like to film that scene in the video interview above, revealing that it was one of the most emotionally impactful scenes of the entire season, and it took an entire day, perhaps more, to film.

The episode came out early on Friday, February 6, on HBO Max because of the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 8 (it’s still airing on HBO in its usual 10/9c time slot that night). It began with Dunk imprisoned for attacking Prince Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett) in Episode 3, after Aerion snapped poor Tanselle’s (Tanzyn Crawford) finger in half. Her crime: depicting a dragon being killed in a puppet show. The Targaryen family’s standing in Westeros is extremely weak at this point in history (about 100 years before the plot of Game of Thrones).

Aerion’s show of extreme force was to remind the smallfolk who was in control of the realm. Dunk didn’t care who Aerion was; hurting Tanselle, or anyone, for no good reason like that would’ve launched him into action no matter what. Egg admires Dunk for his honorable ways and reveals to his uncle, Prince Baelor (Bertie Carvel), later in Episode 4, that he wishes Dunk had killed the brute Aerion.

Egg apologized for keeping his royal identity secret from Dunk in the prison scene. Egg, short for Prince Aegon Targaryen, is the youngest son of Prince Maekar (Sam Spruell). He was supposed to squire for his older brother, Daeron “the Drunken” (Henry Ashton), at the Ashford tournament, but Daeron wasn’t interested. He hid himself and Egg in a nearby town and planned to stay in hiding until the tournament was over. It was Daeron who shaved Egg’s head so they could remain concealed. Egg kept his identity secret from Dunk when they first met because the little boy was desperate to squire in the tournament. Egg cried when Dunk got mad at him in the prison cell. He earnestly apologized, too.

“That was probably my best scene. That was amazing. I feel like we stayed silent and just kept into it, because the amazing director, Sarah Dean Smith, she helped so much in that scene,” Ansell tells TV Insider above, adding, “That was no tear stick or anything. That was just completely real emotion.”

“He’s the real deal,” Claffey adds, beaming with pride.

Steffan Hill / HBO

“It was just silent, and no one said anything between takes,” Ansell says of filming in the jail cell. “We just stayed into that scene.”

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“That scene, what people don’t realize, it took most of the day to film,” Claffey notes. As Ansell adds, “I feel like we spent multiple days on that.”

Claffey prefers to keep the details of how he finds the right emotion for each scene private, but he does tell us that “it can be quite an exhausting thing to stay in that moment. But for me, personally, if you can access that thing but have a way to back away from it, you’re not completely drained at the end of it. It was fun.”

The stars agree that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is “an actor’s dream” because “you get to do all types of acting,” Claffey says, noting the comedy and the stunts before Ansell adds more things he loves.

“That’s what I love about this TV series. There’s all different things,” Ansell says. “There’s goriness. There’s comedy. There’s emotional scenes. There’s twists.”

There are even some fun scenes with animals. Learn about the rats in the prison cell, one of whom was named after Ansell, in the full video above. Next week, prepare for the trial by seven.

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