After years of dragons, armies and sprawling battlefields, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes a more intimate approach to life in Westeros. The world is familiar, but feels smaller, as the hedge knight Dunk tries to find his place within it.
That intimate shift shaped how production designer Tom McCullagh, who also worked as an art director on Game of Thrones, approached the spinoff series.
“We were in between two established worlds with Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon that had massive physical builds and a lot of scale in storytelling,” he says. “We kind of called Knight a parochial story in contrast.”
That meant leaving behind King’s Landing and focusing on the countryside, with tents, a market, and the complicated jousting set.
“It was nice to approach it on that level, the world of innkeepers and peasant farmers and traders,” McCullagh says. “As opposed to thinking about where the dragons were going to be, or where the armies were going to come over the hill.”
Of course, scale still plays a role, especially when Dunk, played by Peter Claffey, arrives at the Ashford tournament. The moment had to feel overwhelming without introducing an overly grand or polished set.
“It was the idea that it didn’t have a huge amount of money, but that it’s had a long history of jousting on that field,” McCullagh says.
Tom McCullagh on the Weathered Westeros of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
To achieve that, the team leaned into time and wear, taking inspiration from overgrown or broken English medieval churches.
The idea was to create a space that felt layered, expanded and repaired over generations. Bringing that to life came with many practical challenges, since the tournament grounds began as open space.
“Essentially, it was a green field site,” McCullagh says. “We had maybe 10 weeks’ work down there, getting it ready, digging it out, and building steelwork for the stand and building steelwork for the bridge and landscaping where the market was going to be.”
The bridge wasn’t part of the original plan, but showrunner Ira Parker suggested it as a way to bring two green spaces together.
“I said, ‘Oh yeah, we can build a bridge,’” McCullagh recalls. “And then I went away thinking, ‘What did I just say?’”
In the end, that decision shaped how the entire space functioned. The bridge wasn’t the only challenge, though: The jousting sequences required sets that could hold up under pressure.
“The whole set, the whole thing with the lists and the posts and the rails, everything was flexible,” McCullagh says, adding that it was necessary for the safety of the animals and crew.
“They couldn’t be falling off their horses onto these solid posts and things like that.”
Building and filming at the outdoor location also came with environmental challenges, particularly since the crew had “horrendous weather from the day and hour that we started to work on that site.”
The team also wanted to show class divides in the ways the characters move around the grounds. McCullagh notes Dunk is at ease in the market, surrounded by traders and performers. That comfort disappears when he enters more formal spaces, and some of the show’s comedy emerges.
“When he started to go around the house tents looking for help, the way they were dressed and the finery of the people in them was the thing that really kind of stood out,” McCullagh says, adding that all of the door frames and ceilings were purposely designed to be low, to emphasize Dunk’s height.
“We wanted to make it quite awkward for him so that when he walked into a room, he had to bend his head. And both times, when he goes into and leaves Plummer’s, he forgets and cracks his head on the door.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now streaming on HBO Max.
Main image: Production designer Tom McCullagh on the main set of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. All photos courtesy of HBO