'A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' star Tom Vaughan-Lawlor breaks down that phlegm scene
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has so far been a refreshingly amusing return to Westeros, but there was one scene that particularly tickled us in episode 1.
We're talking, of course, about the phlegm scene — a moment in the meeting between Dunk (Peter Claffey) and Master of Games Plummer (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) that's so prolonged it's instantly hilarious.
The scene takes place as Dunk is attempting to sign himself up for the Ashford tourney. He enters a room where the Master of Games, Plummer, sits eating at a desk while he works. Dunk attempts to explain who he is and how he came to be a knight, describing the moment when the man he squired for, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), knighted him shortly before his death.
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"When he was dying, he called for his longsword and bade me kneel," says Dunk. "Charged me to be a good knight, to defend the weak and the innocent, serve the realm with all my might — and I swore that I would."
"I thought it would be good if the spit had three clear beats."
In any other context, this would be a passionate, even poignant, speech, but what happens next undercuts it in the best possible way: Plummer clears his sinuses of a truly horrendous-sounding wad of phlegm, revs up, and spits it into a nearby cup, much to Dunk's stunned disgust.
"I thought it would be good if the spit had three clear beats: the hawking back through the nose, so he really got a nice bit of intense leverage into catching the phlegm, then a bit of a fermenting of it in the back of the throat, and then finally a nice, sharp, clean finish and expulsion," Vaughan-Lawlor told Mashable. "It gets a few more outings later in the series."
Vaughan-Lawlor went on to explain that Plummer hawking up phlegm is indeed in the episode's script. "Ira Parker, our showrunner and writer of the episode, gave the character this wonderful little character detail as a kind of manifestation of his stress or a habit that is trying to control stress, a tic he is not even really aware of," he said. "What I love about the scene is that for all his stress, he has enough [empathy] to see that Dunk has something that reminds him a little bit of his younger self: a man of lowly birth, fighting in a very tough world to make something of himself, and that’s why he tries to help him…"
Like all the shows in George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones universe, the attention to detail in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is already shining through — in both the main characters and the smaller ones.
"What is so stunning about even the peripheral characters in the Game of Thrones world is that the writers give them so much detail for an actor to work with," said Vaughan-Lawlor. "It’s all the small little character detail all built up together that give the characters their vividness."
