Fans of Game of Thrones had a sort of chuckle mixed with a rush of nostalgia when they first sat down to watch House of the Dragon. The opening theme graphics changed, but the music—that iconic, rousing theme by Ramin Djawadi—remained the same. The latest Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, does not use the theme music; it doesn’t even have a credits sequence, as showrunner Ira Parker has explained in the past. But the familiar tune does pop up on the show in two important places.
We won’t spoil the specifics of the scenes, but as we said in our A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms review, one is startlingly comedic, and the other is deeply heroic. At a recent Knight press day, io9 asked Parker about why he chose to use the music in those ways.
“We use the Game of Thrones theme at the beginning—on the page it was written as ‘Dunk [Peter Claffey’s character] hears the hero theme in his head.’ We didn’t know exactly what the hero [theme] was going to be at that point. But when we tried a whole bunch of things out, Dunk’s hero theme that [Dan] Romer developed for the show felt like Dunk in this moment now. But what he’s hearing in his head is that call to greatness, that call of a potential something else in the future. And so what is the best call to the greatness of the whole world? The Game of Thrones theme, the most iconic theme that’s ever been laid down before,” Parker explained.
“Immediately, as soon as he hears that music, the reality of what it takes to actually go off and do that, and how terrifying it is, hits him and forces him into a very unheroic [situation],” Parker said. “Which hopefully is very understandable to a lot of people who have had big ideas and [then] they’ve been hit with the reality of ‘How do I go off and do this?”
Then, Parker explained, the Game of Thrones theme returns later in the season because “this is the moment: this is fucking go time. It hits obviously very different at this moment. We feel like, yeah, okay, we’re getting to the Game of Thrones that we remember. And hopefully everybody—like I am, even though I’ve seen this a million times—is getting a little bit of that goosebump feeling that something nice is coming … Fuck, man, if you’re not jumping out of your seats [when you hear the song in this scene], then you’re not a fan of Game of Thrones.”
Elsewhere in the series, the score is far less bombastic, and that’s by design. The main motif is a whistling melody that evokes lonely Westerns rather than medieval battle epics.
“Music overall in the show had to very much be a representation of Dunk,” Parker explained. “We have one POV character, and what was so beautifully done about the original [Game of Thrones] is [that it’s on] this epic scale … there had never been a more epic TV show. So to have this big, booming, epic orchestral score was very important.”
When it came to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Parker said, “We sort of realized early on that that was not going to suit our [needs]. We’re telling a small story here, a small story about a simple person who’s not very great and has smaller ambitions. And so certainly our sound had to suit that, and Romer came in, and I think the key that really unlocked it was finding just a little bit of a sense of whimsy, if that’s the right word.”
“It’s a kid with a silly dream trekking out to a new frontier, trying to do something that’s difficult. Even though obviously he’s an adult and he’s a man, he has a dash of childlike innocence. He just doesn’t know things about the world. He’s very unseasoned compared to everyone else. And so the music had to feel—like everything else in this—it had to be a reflection of Dunk.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres January 18 on HBO and HBO Max.
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