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

Knight of the Seven Kingdoms so far it’s been a refreshing return to Westeros, but there was one scene that really made us laugh in episode 1.

We’re talking, of course, about the phlegm scene – a moment in the meeting between Dunk (Peter Claffey) and Game Manager Plummer (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) that’s so over the top it’s instantly hilarious.

The incident happened as Dunk was trying to sign himself up for a trip to Ashford. He enters the room where the Master of Games, Plummer, is sitting at the table eating while he works. Dunk tries to explain who he is and how he came to be a hero, describing the time when the man he was looking for, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), struck him shortly before his death.

“When he died, he called his ghost and told me to kneel,” said Dunk. “He charged me to be a good warrior, to protect the weak and the innocent, to serve the kingdom with all my might – and I swore I would do it.”

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

In any other context, this would be a fiery, stinging speech, but what happens next undercuts it in the best possible way: Plummer scoops up his offending phlegm with a truly terrifying sound, puts it back up, and spits it into a nearby cup, much to Dunk’s disgust.

“I thought it would be nice if the saliva hit three clear beats: hawking back in the nose, so it got a strong force to hold the phlegm, then it fermented a little bit in the back of the throat, and finally had a nice, sharp, clean finish and expulsion,” Vaughan-Lawlor told Mashable. “It gets a few more exits later in the series.”

Vaughan-Lawlor went on to explain that Plummer spewing phlegm was actually in the script for the episode. “Ira Parker, our showrunner and writer of the episode, gave the actor this cute little character detail as a kind of expression of his depression or a habit of trying to control the stress, a tic that he doesn’t even really know,” he said. “What I love about the scene is that for all his stress, he has enough [empathy] seeing that Dunk has something that reminds him a little of his youth: a man of low birth, fighting in a very difficult world to make something for himself, and that’s why he tries to help him … “

Like all George RR Martin shows Game of Thrones universal, attention to detail in Knight of the Seven Kingdoms it already shines – in both major and minor characters.

“What’s so amazing about even the peripheral characters in the Game of Thrones the world is that the writers give them a lot of details for the actor to work with,” said Vaughan-Lawlor. “All the little details of the character all built together make the characters clear.”

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