‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ star Tom Vaughan-Lawlor breaks down that phlegm scene

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has up to now been a refreshingly amusing return to Westeros, however there was one scene that notably tickled us in episode 1.

We’re speaking, after all, concerning the phlegm scene — a second within the assembly between Dunk (Peter Claffey) and Grasp of Video games Plummer (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) that is so extended it is immediately hilarious.

The scene takes place as Dunk is trying to signal himself up for the Ashford tourney. He enters a room the place the Grasp of Video games, Plummer, sits consuming at a desk whereas he works. Dunk makes an attempt to clarify who he’s and the way he got here to be a knight, describing the second when the person he squired for, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), knighted him shortly earlier than his dying.

“When he was dying, he referred to as for his longsword and bade me kneel,” says Dunk. “Charged me to be a superb knight, to defend the weak and the harmless, serve the realm with all my would possibly — and I swore that I’d.”

“I believed it will be good if the spit had three clear beats.”

In every other context, this could be a passionate, even poignant, speech, however what occurs subsequent undercuts it in the absolute best approach: Plummer clears his sinuses of a very horrendous-sounding wad of phlegm, revs up, and spits it into a close-by cup, a lot to Dunk’s surprised disgust.

“I believed it will be good if the spit had three clear beats: the hawking again by means of the nostril, so he actually bought a pleasant little bit of intense leverage into catching the phlegm, then a little bit of a fermenting of it at the back of the throat, after which lastly a pleasant, sharp, clear end and expulsion,” Vaughan-Lawlor advised Mashable. “It will get a number of extra outings later within the sequence.”

Vaughan-Lawlor went on to clarify that Plummer hawking up phlegm is certainly within the episode’s script. “Ira Parker, our showrunner and author of the episode, gave the character this excellent little character element as a sort of manifestation of his stress or a behavior that’s making an attempt to manage stress, a tic he isn’t even actually conscious of,” he mentioned. “What I like concerning the scene is that for all his stress, he has sufficient [empathy] to see that Dunk has one thing that reminds him just a little little bit of his youthful self: a person of lowly beginning, preventing in a really robust world to make one thing of himself, and that’s why he tries to assist him…”

Like all of the reveals in George R.R. Martin’s Sport of Thrones universe, the eye to element in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is already shining by means of — in each the principle characters and the smaller ones.

“What’s so beautiful about even the peripheral characters within the Sport of Thrones world is that the writers give them a lot element for an actor to work with,” mentioned Vaughan-Lawlor. “It’s all of the small little character element all constructed up collectively that give the characters their vividness.”

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is streaming on HBO, with new episodes dropping Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.