‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ star Tom Vaughan-Lawlor breaks down that phlegm scene

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has so far been a refreshing and fun return to Westeros, but there was one scene that particularly tickled us in Episode 1.

We’re talking, of course, about the phlegm scene – a moment in Dunk’s (Peter Claffey) meeting with games master Plummer (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) that drags on so long it’s instantly hilarious.

The scene takes place as Dunk attempts to enter the Ashford tournament. He enters a room where the games master, Plummer, is sitting at a desk while he works. Dunk attempts to explain who he is and how he became a knight, describing the moment when the man he scoured for, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), knighted him shortly before his death.

“When he was dying, he asked for his longsword and asked me to kneel,” Dunk said. “Charged me to be a good knight, to defend the weak and the innocent, to serve the kingdom with all my might – and I have sworn to do so.”

“I thought it would be nice if the spit had three clear beats.”

In any other context, this would be an impassioned, even poignant speech, but what happens next undermines it in the best way possible: Plummer clears his sinuses of a truly awful-sounding wad of phlegm, revs up, and spits it into a nearby cup, much to Dunk’s stunned disgust.

“I thought it would be nice if the spit had three clear beats: peddling through the nose, so it really has a good, intense leverage to catch the phlegm, then a little fermentation of it at the back of the throat, and finally a nice, crisp, clean finish and expulsion,” Vaughan-Lawlor told Mashable. “There will be a few more releases later in the series.”

Vaughan-Lawlor went on to explain that Plummer peddling phlegm was indeed in the episode’s storyline. “Ira Parker, our showrunner and writer for the episode, gave the character this wonderful little character detail as sort of a manifestation of his stress or a habit that’s trying to control stress, a tic that he’s not even really aware of,” he said. “What I like about this scene is that despite all his stress, he’s had enough [empathy] to see that Dunk has something that reminds him a little of his younger self: a man of modest birth, who is struggling in a very difficult world to make something of himself, and that’s why he tries to help…”

Like all George RR Martin shows Game of Thrones universe, the attention to detail in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms already shines through – both in the main characters and the smaller ones.

“What is so surprising, even about the peripheral characters of the Game of Thrones The world is that the writers give them so many details that an actor can work with,” Vaughan-Lawlor said. “It’s all the little details of the characters, all built together, that give the characters their vividness.”

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms airs on HBO, with new episodes airing Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.