A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is nearly done filming its second season — and the road to get there has been, by the showrunner’s own colorful description, an absolute nightmare.
Showrunner Ira Parker spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to confirm that production on Season 2 is now in its final weeks and remains on track for a first half of 2027 premiere on HBO, according to Collider. But getting to this point involved a series of natural disasters that nobody on the production could have anticipated.
Table of Contents
A Season Cursed by the Weather
The production of Season 2 required adapting George R.R. Martin’s second Dunk and Egg novella, The Sworn Sword — a story set during a devastating drought. To capture that arid, sun-scorched atmosphere authentically, the production relocated from Northern Ireland to the Canary Islands in Spain, seeking guaranteed sunshine and dry landscapes.
What they got instead was a once-in-a-century storm that triggered severe flooding across the region, causing national emergencies and bringing filming to a complete standstill on multiple occasions. The crew had to be placed on hiatus while the production waited out conditions that were the precise opposite of what the story required. Parker described the entire Season 2 experience with a phrase that leaves little to the imagination — calling it a complete ordeal from start to finish.
The irony of traveling to shoot a drought storyline and being hit by historic flooding was not lost on the production team.
George R.R. Martin’s Unpublished Pages
Despite the production chaos, Season 2 carries a genuinely exciting piece of news for devoted fans of Martin’s work. Parker revealed that Martin has remained deeply involved in the series and went a significant step further than just consulting on the adaptation — he provided Parker with previously unpublished written pages discovered in his own files, material that has never been seen by readers anywhere in the world.
Parker confirmed that this material has been incorporated directly into the show, and that for the most dedicated fans of the Dunk and Egg universe, it represents genuine canon content straight from Martin’s own archive — even if it also serves as a reminder that The Winds of Winter remains unfinished.
The Long-Term Plan for Dunk and Egg
Parker also shared his broader vision for where the series goes beyond Season 2. He outlined a plan to adapt all of Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas in order, before potentially pausing the show at a natural story endpoint and returning years later when Dexter Sol Ansell — who plays Egg — has aged into the older version of the character that later stories require.
He was emphatic that Ansell is irreplaceable in the role, describing him as definitively his version of Egg regardless of what timeline adjustments the production needs to make. The plan accounts for the fact that Book Four of Martin’s novella series is currently being written, and Book Five represents a natural conclusion to Egg’s boyhood story — making it the ideal stopping point before a future return.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2 is expected to premiere on HBO in the first half of 2027.
Discover more from A2Z Filming Location
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.