Lorna Ó Ríordáin’s costume designing career has encompassed many genres, including a crime saga in 1920s Birmingham (“Peaky Blinders”), a contemporary Irish drama (“Normal People”) and a 1700s pirate adventure (“Treasure Island,” for which she received an Emmy nomination in 2012). But HBO’s “Game of Thrones” spin-off “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” brought her somewhere new: the world of fantasy.
“I didn’t know if it would be suitable for me, to be honest,” Ó Ríordáin told TheWrap. “Once I read the treatment — and I was aware of ‘Game of Thrones’ and the beautiful craft of it — I thought, OK, I think I could do something with this. The stories are really engaging. It was inspiring. The characters were strong, and that’s the bottom line: If you feel like you can bring something to a character, help them express themselves in a visual way, that’s what gets you involved.”
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” doesn’t look like your typical “Thrones” show. To start, it takes place in a yet-unexplored time period nestled roughly halfway between “GoT” and its prequel “House of the Dragon” (set around 200 years apart). It is also more lighthearted, focusing on the relationship between lowborn knight Dunk (Peter Claffey) and his young, highborn squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell). There are only six episodes, each running about 42 minutes.
This means fresh characters, a new look — and a relatively small budget for a period fantasy series. That was no easy feat, especially considering most of the show is set at a densely crowded tournament.
“You choose the things that are really important to the story, work backward from there and see what you can afford in the end,” she said.
She addressed the hardest part first: the armor. The climax of “Seven Kingdoms” comes in the fifth episode, which features a seven-against-seven trial by combat. Ó Ríordáin had never created this kind of costume before, so she worked closely with the show’s armorer, Simon Brindle.
“He told me, ‘Just treat it like any other costume. Start with your costume sketch,’” she explained. “We worked it out in a practical way. He’d tell me, ‘Well, he’s not going to be able to move his head unless we do this.’ So you learn about pauldrons and shoulder movements and how things attach and how uncomfortable it is sitting in this, and the movement for stuntmen on horseback as opposed to an actor. There are so many different things that were fascinating to learn.”
A lot can be gleaned about these characters just by looking at their armor. Honest commoner Dunk wears simple protection, while the villainous, aristocratic Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett) wears an ostentatious helm (or head covering) modeled after himself. “He would be vain enough to have his own face,” Ó Ríordáin noted. “It’s slightly grotesque.”
The boisterous Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings) gets some of the show’s flashiest looks. “He’s there to show off, to peacock. He’s there to party,” Ó Ríordáin said. The Targaryens, Westeros’ ruling family, are dressed in formalwear and “impractical” armor, because, as she put it, “They’re there, obviously, to represent their kingdom. It’s pageantry.”
Dunk’s unassuming clothing, by contrast, symbolizes “his integrity, his valor, his humility, his strength” — everything that makes him the knight to root for.
“He can barely even think of what to put on his sigil,” Ó Ríordáin said, referring to the emblem (an elm tree and a shooting star) on his shield. “His costume had to reflect that. It had to be so simple and practical he would disappear into the crowd of small folk.”
That pairs nicely with Egg, who starts off the series in peasant attire to blend in and only dons his family garb after his Targaryen lineage is revealed.
“It’s almost like it’s a Scottish kilt,” Ó Ríordáin shared. “They have their own print, their own textile. These are their traveling clothes. He’s obviously been on the road, he’s run off, so they have these garments with them.”
Ó Ríordáin lost count of how many pieces her team made for tourney-goers and various members of the nobility. When it came to dressing the massive crowds, she simply said, “I’ve got a great team of people that can manage that like running a battlefield.”
This story first ran in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
