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Watch A Knight in the Making Season 1 Episode 1 online in HD on Dailymotion (2026).
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00:06We are, of course, back in Westeros.
00:10I can't really believe that it's happening sometimes.
00:14This was going to be different from Game of Thrones.
00:17We're taking a look at Westeros from the ground up,
00:20rather than the POV of kings and queens.
00:24There's a grit and an earthiness in it,
00:26but it's a sweet at its heart tale
00:28of two slightly hapless characters.
00:30See to the horses.
00:32You'll get a copper if you do well,
00:33and a clout in the ear if you do not.
00:35Sorry, lads. Apologies. Sorry. Go again.
00:53I don't know the right words.
00:55Ought to be a sefton here.
00:57You're a true knight.
00:59Precinct!
01:01A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is based on the first of three of George's sort of beloved novellas,
01:08A Hedge Knight.
01:08The story follows Sir Duncan the Tall,
01:11a new knight who comes from very little,
01:13and is on his way to Ashford to compete in a tournament,
01:17and egg his new squire who he meets along the way.
01:21It's right in the middle of the two shows that have been on so far.
01:24It's somewhere between sort of a 90 to 100 years between House of the Dragon and the beginning game of
01:30Thrones.
01:33Do the dead frighten you?
01:35The realm is at peace.
01:37There's no dragons anymore,
01:38but there's people who are living who once saw The Last Dragon.
01:47I met George, and we had discussions about what the series should be.
01:53Ira's great. He has a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of resonance with the story.
01:57Owen had one of the greatest pitches I've ever seen from a director.
02:02Lots of our conversations were about how to maintain the tone of Game of Thrones,
02:06but allow the audience to sit into this grungier world where you can almost live the life of a Hedge
02:12Knight.
02:13It's a Hedge Knight, ain't it?
02:15What?
02:16It's like a knight, but sadder.
02:18No, I'm not.
02:20He's got to sleep in the hedges because no lard will have it.
02:23A Hedge Knight is a knight that has no formal allegiance to anyone.
02:29And he's called a Hedge Knight because a lot of the time,
02:32he's sleeping rough outside under hedges.
02:35Sir Duncan the Tor.
02:37Four pages for Sir Duncan.
02:39He must have been quite a man.
02:41So they say.
02:41We're so used to being in big, important rooms with kings and important people
02:46and suddenly disappearing to this different lair of Westeros
02:50is a real opportunity to tell a story that felt grittier, earthier, maybe more honest.
02:56Oi!
02:58My lord.
02:59You thief!
03:00I did not mean to offend you.
03:01Take that armor off you.
03:03Now!
03:05The biggest challenge was actually casting because to get the casting right was crucial.
03:10We had a lot of fun casting it.
03:12I love Peter as Dunk and Dexter as Egg.
03:15Peter absolutely stuck out because he was just incredibly charming.
03:21What are you doing?
03:22Cooking fish.
03:23Do you want something?
03:24I mean, how did you get here?
03:26He's an ex-professional rugby player and there was something about his team mentality
03:31that sort of lets all take this on and have a fun swing at it.
03:35Let's go!
03:36Woo!
03:38I remember meeting Owen and Ira for the first time since the audition process
03:42and I went to the toilet and I puked everywhere in the production office
03:46because I was just so nervous and so full of anxiety.
03:49I was like to Ira, you know, that was pretty mental.
03:52He was like, oh, that's great, man.
03:54It's so good because that's just like Dunk.
03:56You know what I mean?
03:57Sir Dunk?
03:59That's no name for a knight.
04:01Dexter was the first person our casting director sent me.
04:06At first, I didn't know what I was auditioning for.
04:09I didn't know anything about Game of Thrones or House of Dragons because I'm too young to watch it.
04:13We asked everybody to come in just sort of with a prepared story that told us a little bit about
04:18their personality.
04:19He charmed everybody and he was funny.
04:21Who here likes the pickles on a McDonald's burger?
04:25Me.
04:26Do you like them?
04:27Do you like them?
04:27No.
04:28No.
04:30Personally, I hate them.
04:31Not for me.
04:32Yucky, yucky.
04:33You got the role, Dexter.
04:35Congratulations.
04:36He is egg and he was also very excited to shave his head.
04:39And that was a big stipulation for George.
04:42No bald caps.
04:43Hi guys, it's Dexter and I am shaving my hair off.
04:48I cannot believe it.
04:50See you soon.
04:53What were we doing today?
04:55Today, we were practicing scripts and doing a run through of the whole thing.
05:01How do you think it went?
05:02It went great.
05:04Episode one, The Hedge Knight.
05:05We open over black.
05:07The table read in London was the first opportunity to put a face and put a voice to all these
05:13characters that you've been imagining.
05:16Half man.
05:17Do I look like a half man to you?
05:19Why?
05:20Half man, half giant.
05:21It was so, so nice to finally read the scripts with everyone.
05:26You don't look to be a knight.
05:28And what, do all knights look the same, do they?
05:30No.
05:31They don't look like you either.
05:33A big part of it was actually hearing how the humour was going to work.
05:37Our hero theme comes on the soundtrack, the roar of a crowd.
05:43Moments later, Dunk's shit's water.
05:47The tone of this show is probably what marks it out most in terms of its humour.
05:51There's going to be this slightly absurd sense to this world.
06:00We love Game of Thrones and we want to pay tribute to as much as we possibly can while also
06:06giving everybody something new and something fresh.
06:10See you all in Westeros.
06:12I mean, Belfast.
06:13Belfast.
06:13See you all there.
06:16The exterior of a gravesite, the Reach.
06:19A hugely tall, shaggy, big-boned boy, Dunk, digs a grave in the softened ground.
06:24Dunk's first line in the show is...
06:26I don't know the right words.
06:27That is, Dunk wrapped up into a neat little package.
06:31He was lost and directionless.
06:33So the purpose of shooting it in that big, wide-open vista is to sort of exaggerate that fact.
06:39Our base is Belfast, which was where the original Thrones was based.
06:45There is such an institutional memory there.
06:47It's a question of familiarity of crews.
06:50They understood the world.
06:51They understood the energy within it.
06:53It was the first time we'd ever used a rain machine.
06:55It's about to get cool.
06:58We were under that thing for six hours, and it was freezing cold.
07:06Fits my grip as well as it ever fit his.
07:09Sir Arlen's sword wanted to come across as a utilitarian sword and not too showy.
07:14So when I drew it up, I did a really big pommer on it and a really kind of chunky
07:19crossguard as well.
07:20There is very little detail in this, but what is there is telling a story.
07:24I talked to Ira about putting some influence from Sir Arlen into that pommel, and he thought it would be
07:30a really nice idea to put a copper penny into there.
07:33We've got some copper pennies, which we've got on the top here, which I've inlaid, which we've actually made using
07:37a coin press here.
07:38Blade steel, hollow ground, so it kind of catches the light nicely.
07:43I think my favorite piece of the whole show has got to be the shield.
07:46Here we've got Sir Arlen's shield.
07:48This is a special make.
07:50It's got a wooden base.
07:52Our blacksmith manufactured the metalwork to go around the outside, then we molded it as a single piece.
07:56And then on it, it's got a white-winged chalice, and it's also got a sort of blue chevron.
08:01That just helps to make it sort of a bit more punchy as an addition from George's books.
08:09Dunk sets off a stride sweetfoot with the two other horses in tow.
08:13The three organisms I've spent the most time with, I think, are Dunk's three horses.
08:17What? I can't tell them who you're playing.
08:21Christ.
08:22These are all devil's horsemen horses.
08:25Dume played sweetfoot.
08:26Shrek played chestnut.
08:28And Garacha played thunder.
08:30We've been really lucky with Peter, because he was available to us 12 weeks before shooting.
08:36And he's very enthusiastic.
08:37He's turned up for every single lesson.
08:39I spend pretty much every day other than the weekends in the saddle.
08:42I've got a really, really brilliant teacher, Emma.
08:45I hope I'm not driving her crazy with my inability to get things done.
08:49But we tack up the horses.
08:51We give them a little bit of a wash and a brush.
08:53Put on the saddles.
08:54Put on the stirrups and the bridle.
08:56He spent weeks and weeks and weeks and hours and hours and hours of horse riding.
09:00He put the work in, and it comes off on screen.
09:04Later that night, outside an inn, a warm yellow light spills from the windows of a timber building.
09:09A skinny stable boy, 10 years old, in a rough-spun brown cloak, emerges from a stool.
09:15When Egg came out of the shadows, it felt like he just walked off the pages of George's book.
09:21The first day on set, it was so fun.
09:23The costume was amazing, but I warn you, it was a bit itchy.
09:27We gave him a long robe, because Dexter is a nine-year-old boy that we fitted seven months before.
09:33He was going to grow, so it kind of helped us that it was a very loose garment.
09:37And Dunk meeting Egg was an important scene.
09:39This is the first time you actually see Dunk relating to another human being, so we can see his size.
09:45It was lovely working with Peter for the first time.
09:48I'm meeting Peter.
09:50I'm so excited, and I literally can't hide it.
09:54Peter was wonderful at just getting in touch with him, saying, do you want to go out?
09:58They struck up this little sort of friendship.
10:00A lot of people started talking to me, going, oh, it's so great that you went to the arcade and
10:04bowling with Dexter.
10:05What are you talking about? I wanted to go to the arcade, too.
10:08I kicked his ass in Mario Kart so many times.
10:11Make sure they say that. I kicked his ass in Mario Kart.
10:14And I was Princess Peach.
10:16He's beaten me in bowling, but he had the bumpers up.
10:20We won't say any much about that. He had the bumpers up. I didn't.
10:26We're in Esheret Meadow, in the Reach, in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.
10:31Whoa, the scale of the set was just incredible.
10:34Like, something I'd never seen before.
10:36Our genius production designer, Tom McCullough, built us a 360-degree playground of Ashford Meadow.
10:44You could look any way, and it could have been the exact same in the 14th century.
10:50When I started out on this, there were a couple of suggestions for where Ashford could be.
10:55How George describes in the book, there's a river, you've got the jousting area, you've got the castle in the
11:01background.
11:02How do we stage that in one place?
11:05We went to an estate called Glen Armistate.
11:09It gave us absolutely every element from a location perspective.
11:14Looking at the river, I was thinking at the time, can we get a bridge across this river?
11:19It turns out we could get a bridge across the river.
11:25We finished up using two and a half foot in depth high beams, and we had that all clad with
11:30timber for strength.
11:32It's a salmon river, so there couldn't be any kind of threat to the potential of the salmon moving up
11:37the river.
11:37We weren't allowed to drop any legs into the water.
11:40It had to be one span across the river.
11:43We dressed it up with our period timber.
11:46Suddenly it became a key part of the scripts.
11:49It looks so real.
11:50They should keep that bridge.
11:52That's a great bridge.
11:55The discussions going into this show were, let's get as much in camera as possible.
12:00We want to limit the amount of visual effects needed, because what's real is real, and that's always going to
12:05look the best.
12:06There's just so much variety to it.
12:07There's so many props.
12:08You've got the merchant's row area, which is all sorts of foods and spices and Moroccan-inspired markets.
12:15You've got the tournament field.
12:17It's a practical jousting ground.
12:22And then at the bottom, you've got the house tents.
12:24The tents were insane at night.
12:27All of them are lighting up.
12:29This is the tournament ground that all the big families want to come and show off, hence they bring their
12:34best tents.
12:35Here we have the Fossaways, the Tyrells, the Lannisters, and the Baratheon tent.
12:44When you're looking around the grounds, it's not hard to spot the Baratheon tent, because you have the two large
12:49stag heads on it, and kind of shouting out, we are the Baratheons, you know.
12:52Look at us.
12:56Really?
12:57Lionel Baratheon.
12:58The laughing storm, they call him.
13:00I thought he'd be bigger.
13:04When we first meet Lionel in episode one, he has his big Baratheon tent, of which he's the sort of
13:09master of that kingdom.
13:10A hundred gold to the man, beast, or God, who sticks me best.
13:14When I got the scripts, they kind of said there was a character described as a cross between Jack Sparrow
13:20and Ernest Hemingway.
13:21Something about that collection of names made me feel like, yeah, I think I probably would be interested.
13:26I'm a huge, huge Daniel Ings fan.
13:29Getting to become his friend, it's just something I never thought would happen.
13:32I beg your pardon, Sir Lionel?
13:34Big men.
13:35Get fucked up, I feel like I'm shouting, I'm sorry.
13:38Okay.
13:39The Baratheon tent is one of the first biggest scenes, so we wanted this to be not too dark, because
13:45it's supposed to be a party.
13:47We shot it in a studio, and it's only lit by candlelight inside this tent.
13:52A lot of use of the stag, antlers, et cetera, for lighting.
13:58When it's lit, it kind of glows.
14:02Do you like dancing?
14:04Doesn't everyone?
14:08There's nothing I love more than when people dance in movies.
14:11So many films that have inspired me.
14:14A big one coming into this was Filler on the Roof.
14:17I want it to be weird.
14:18I want it to have energy.
14:20We brought in an incredible choreographer from Dublin, Belinda Murphy, who completely understood what I was going for.
14:27When you're in this position here, you can turn it into a kind of run, contract here.
14:34You know, like a tuck jump.
14:37I very much study what the characteristics of the character is.
14:42Dunk is slightly nervous, so his movement is a little tighter, more stoked and still.
14:46Lionel's nimble.
14:47He's playful, unpredictable.
14:49It's almost like a ballet dancer, but loose and very energetic.
14:54It's so mental, because you're trying to get him into your vibe.
14:58Owen came up with the idea for stomping on the feet.
15:02He doesn't quite know how to shake off this slight annoyance that Dunk is just that much bigger than him.
15:13And then it just turns into a bit of a crazy dance.
15:17We actually let the camera dance along with the characters.
15:20We shot this in slow motion and also opened up the shutter angle, which makes this a little bit more
15:25dreamy and drunk.
15:26I used to be a drummer, so I feel like I got moves.
15:29It's a good opportunity to get a bit wild.
15:32Go big or go home.
15:38You, what are you doing?
15:41Dunk survived his first day of being a knight and probably feeling quite small in this world.
15:47So he's sort of open to this idea of a companionship.
15:51I feel swear to do as you're told.
15:53I'll let you serve me for the tourney.
15:55He and Dex have a lot of fun shooting that.
15:57Amor, Amor.
15:58What's your name?
16:00Sir Duncan the Tall.
16:01Stop it.
16:02Stay.
16:02That moment at the end where they're laying on their back staring up at the stars is quite hopeful.
16:08They've been given this tiny little gift, which is this shooting star.
16:11It's a lovely way of just bonding two characters before you then set off and chuck them into everything else.
16:18Falling star brings luck to those who see it.
16:20So the luck is ours alone.
16:25Dunk is starting to feel like there's something universal at play.
16:29It's a lovely way to end the episode.
16:31I'm very enthused about these characters.
16:33It's so great to see this come alive.
16:35This episode gives us a wonderful new POV into George's beautiful, rich world of Westeros.
16:43What chance do I have?
16:45Truly.
16:48I don't know.
16:50But it's a great honor to test oneself against a worthy foe.
16:55But it's a great honor to test oneself against a worthy foe.
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