Peter Claffey on his journey from pro rugby to leading the new Game of Thrones spinoff: ‘I had a bit of a meltdown’

Most actors have a warm, endearing story about the moment they landed their big break – you know the sort. Tears, hugs, phone calls to parents, a quiet thank you to the heavens. Peter Claffey’s was not that. When he was told he had been cast as the lead in HBO’s new Game of Thrones spin-off, it took a while to sink in. He was standing in a costume fitting room in Belfast when his body finally caught up with the news. “I was pissing sweat,” the Irish actor says. “[I thought] my heart can’t actually beat any faster.” He raced to the bathroom and vomited so violently that it was almost comical. “I’m telling you, I’ve never thrown up as much in my entire life,” he says, comparing it to the scene in Team America: World Police where a puppet projectile-vomits for a minute straight. “It was a f***ing rollercoaster.”

It’s an apt enough origin story for a series like this: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, premiering on Sky Atlantic this week, is as gross and vomit-filled as Thrones has ever been. Before he joined the cast, Claffey had just a handful of small roles to his name (notably as the craic-less love interest Joe in Apple TV+’s acclaimed Irish comedy series Bad Sisters and opposite Cillian Murphy in the historical drama Small Things Like These). Now, he was being thrust into the centre of one of the most rabid fandoms in the world. Game of Thrones: when it comes to pop-cultural impact, there are few TV shows this century that can match HBO’s hit fantasy adaptation. In the new spin-off, set some 90 years before the events of Thrones and based on George RR Martin’s “Dunk and Egg” novellas, Claffey plays Ser Duncan the Tall – a soft-hearted hero who takes “Egg”, a wise, bald child played by Dexter Sol Ansell, as his squire.

Despite his lack of experience, it’s easy to see why Claffey, a former rugby player, was cast as the gentle, physically imposing hedge knight (a kind of tatty, landless knight-errant in Martin’s world). He’s 6ft 5in and built like an industrial fridge, with a heavy, stubbled jaw. But he’s far from the average rugby jock: today, appearing over FaceTime from his home in Galway, Claffey has his long, reddish hair scraped back with a hairband, Fernando Torres-style, and his glasses are the kind that magnify his eyes to bug-like proportions. “I'm a complete f***ing nerd,” he jokes.

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Claffey grew up in small-town Ireland, “where you're either cool by getting loads of women or by being really good at sports”. He opted for the latter. By 19, he was 119kg of brute force, and his physicality earned him a spot on the Ireland U20s rugby union team. “My whole identity became just being a rugby player. All of the things like performing, acting and music – they all got put on the back burner,” he says. He went on to sign a development contract with Connacht Rugby – one of Ireland’s four professional teams – which proved to be a bruising education. He failed to break into the first team and found himself stranded in a kind of sporting limbo. “It was probably the most isolating, lonely year I’ve ever had,” he admits. “It’s very hard to have the banter with lads when you’re not feeling part of the cause.”

Around the same time, Claffey was building a following on Instagram for sketch comedy. “It was really sort of setting my soul on fire doing that,” he recalls. Before turning to a conventional fallback – “the office job, or manual labour for the rest of my life” – he decided to take a punt on acting school, and got “very lucky”, he says. “I definitely feel a lot happier now than I did when I was playing rugby, for sure,” he says.

Just as Claffey defies expectations, Ser Duncan – or “Dunk” to his friends – is not exactly the gallant knight of fairytales. He is naïve and uncertain, desperate to prove himself as one of the defenders of Westeros but lacking the pedigree or training to do so. Claffey plays him with an overgrown quality, like a shy schoolboy trapped in the body of Tyson Fury. In his youth, Claffey was particularly self-conscious about his body: “I’ve been like that my whole life,” he says. “I got a decent bit of bullying when I was a kid. I was sort of weird-looking; wobbly; uncoordinated.”

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While filming A Knight, series creator Ira Parker sought to reassure him that the character is “supposed to be nervous”. That said, Parker might not have realised quite how rattled his star man was. As he progressed through the audition stages, Claffey’s health was fast declining due to stress. “I was like, if I get this, I'm gonna have to go to hospital or something,” he recalls.

After receiving the confirmatory call from his agents, he remembers his girlfriend coming home to find him on the floor, sheet white, curled into the fetal position. “I just had a bit of a meltdown,” he says. “What should have been such a beautiful, amazing experience just turned into one of the worst days I’ve ever had in my life.” The aftermath forced a reckoning. Claffey says he embarked on what he describes as a “spiritual journey” to confront his anxiety, and he insists he’s now in “great health”. Talking about it still feels strange. “It’s weird,” he admits, “because nobody has a f***ing clue!”

While extreme, his trepidation was not necessarily unfounded. When Game of Thrones ended in 2019, it inspired one of the most vicious fan revolts in history. Claffey admits he was among them. “I was obsessed with the original series,” he says. “I was one of those people that was like, that ending wasn’t good enough.” The shadow cast by the infamous finale has put immense pressure on any new projects, such as the prequel series House of the Dragon, which many feel has failed to capture the magic of its predecessor. Claffey is acutely aware of the scrutiny A Knight will face, but that doesn’t make it any less scary. “It’s totally terrifying,” he says, “because it’s not like it’s an original product and it's also not something that I don't give a s*** about.” He exhales. “I really, really want to get things right for this.”

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Something Claffey wasn’t worried about, at least, was the franchise’s propensity for gratuitous violence and nudity. I point out that even Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss recently admitted they went too far with some scenes. Claffey is aghast. “They thought they went too far?” he asks incredulously. “It’s sex and dragons,” he points out, echoing Ian McShane’s notorious assessment of the series he once guest-starred in. “That’s what Game of Thrones is, isn’t it? It is that adult fantasy thing and it has a huge fan base for that.” Without spoiling anything, it’s fair to say Claffey gets a classic Thrones beatdown in A Knight. “I was hoping it would be as gruesome as possible,” he says. “That’s the way it’s described in the book, so I’m glad we really took it to that level, 100 per cent.”

Claffey is determined to do the material justice, not just for the fans, but for Martin himself, with whom he has a “decent relationship”. He adds: “If the creator – the person that set fire to this absolute world in their mind – if they’re happy with how it’s gone, that’s really good for me. I’m happy then.”

For a man who once asked himself who he was without rugby, Claffey now has an answer. It might just come with some sweat, some fear, and the occasional bout of spectacular vomiting.

‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ launches on Sky and streaming service NOW from 19 January