HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has quietly added a key piece of casting that deepens Ser Duncan the Tall’s backstory. Young British actor Bamber Todd, best known for leading the festive fantasy The Heist Before Christmas, will portray a younger version of Dunk in flashback sequences, tying the towering hedge knight’s future heroism back to his rough beginnings.
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Bamber Todd, star of The Heist Before Christmas, will play young Dunk in season 1 flashbacks.
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The flashbacks are set to explore Dunk’s Flea Bottom roots and early years as a squire before his hedge knight days.
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Egg actor Dexter Sol Ansell says A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is “probably the most disturbing thing” he’s been in, despite its lighter tone.
Bamber Todd steps from Christmas caper to Flea Bottom grit
In The Heist Before Christmas, Todd played Mikey Collins, a disillusioned 12‑year‑old who stumbles across two very different Santas in the woods and gets pulled into a strange, morally complicated holiday adventure. That performance—mixing vulnerability, streetwise edge, and a scrappy determination to protect his family—now looks like a natural audition tape for young Dunk, a boy raised with nothing in the slums of Flea Bottom before being taken on as a squire by Ser Arlan of Pennytree.
Reports confirm that Todd will appear in flashbacks during season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, showing Dunk before he becomes the wandering hedge knight played in the present timeline by Peter Claffey. These glimpses are expected to highlight how a nameless, parentless child with no noble house learns the basics of survival, loyalty, and chivalry on the roads of Westeros long before Ashford Meadow, Egg, or any trial by combat.
Credit: Steffan Hill/HBO
For book readers, it’s a chance to see fragments of stories only hinted at in the novellas; for new viewers, it reinforces that Dunk’s massive frame hides a history defined by hunger, fear, and hard-earned grit.
Egg’s actor calls the show “the most disturbing thing” he’s done
While Todd will give audiences a look at Dunk’s earliest years, present‑day Egg actor Dexter Sol Ansell has already warned that, even with its humor, this is still very much a Westeros story. In a recent interview, Ansell called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms “definitely… the lighter version of Game of Thrones, though I haven’t watched it,” but added that it’s “probably the most disturbing thing I’ve been in. It’s not pitch‑perfect happy.”
Read next: Are Dunk and Egg Targaryens?
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