As fans eagerly await the arrival of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, bringing another corner of George R.R. Martin’s Westeros to HBO, the showrunner of the Game of Thrones spinoff is teasing the return of a familiar character. Sort of. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place about a century before Game of Thrones, so it would have to be someone we met on the latter show very, very late in their life. Someone like, say… Walder Frey.
The Lord of the Crossing—very well known to fans of both Martin’s books and the HBO series for hosting the infamous Red Wedding—is of extremely advanced age when we meet his incarnation played by David Bradley. But time hasn’t softened his devious, unforgiving nature, as Robb Stark and company learn the hard way. And, as Martin’s Dunk character learns in The Mystery Knight, the third novella in the series that inspired A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Walder was a pill even as a tot.
In the story, Dunk and Egg find themselves at a wedding feast involving a daughter of House Frey—a wedding hastened into being because the bride’s younger brother caught her fooling around with a servant. The younger brother is a toddler that Dunk finds so annoying he has a thought to chuck him down a well—imagine the history he could’ve rewritten!
And A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker teased he wouldn’t be against giving wee Walder a cameo, according to Polygon.
“My favorite [cameo idea] is, and look, it’s not until the third book, but there’s a baby Walder Frey,” Parker told the outlet. “I have this, hopefully, really funny idea that people are probably gonna kill me for. But this idea that something’s happening, like there’s a runaway horse cart, and this baby’s about to be killed, and Dunk intervenes and saves baby Walder Frey.”
If A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms goes there, Parker continued, it wouldn’t involve a big wink at the audience to make sure everyone caught the reference. “We don’t ever make a thing of it,” he said. “It just happens, and we’re on with the story. That’s sort of the closest we get to [a direct crossover with characters] in the three novels that have been written.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which adapts The Hedge Knight, the first Dunk and Egg tale, hits HBO January 18.
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