Peter Claffey’s remarkable journey from rugby to Thrones

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 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.

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.