An 11-year-old Dexter Sol Ansell is peering into his Zoom camera, hands pressed to his cheeks and mouth wide open in mock shock.
The young British star is, for The Hollywood Reporter‘s benefit, re-enacting his run-in with comedy legend Steve Carell at HBO Max’s U.K. launch party a couple of months ago. “I go around, I’m just saying hi to people, and people are saying hi. And then I walk around this corner, and there’s just Steve Carell on a chair.” (Cue aforementioned recreation of starstruck-ness.)
“I was like, ‘Should I say hi or should I not? I don’t know what to do!’ and Mummy went, ‘Oh, go on, just say hi,’” he explains. “So I creeped over, and then I went, ‘Hi,’ and he went, ‘Omg! I love you! You’re amazing!’ Steve Carell knows who I am? That was crazy.”
Crazy is an apt descriptor for what this kid’s life has looked like since his first audition (for U.K. soap Emmerdale, of all things) at age four. He has continued to impress in every project since, such as The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, where he played a young Coriolanus Snow, and later, in 2024’s mystery-horror The Moor.
But no one could have prepared themselves for the sheer talent — and striking maturity — with which Ansell co-led season one of Ira Parker’s triumphant Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. As the mischievous squire Egg (who would go on to reveal his true identity as Prince Aegon Targaryen), a smooth-headed Ansell shot to stardom upon its January release on HBO. Rave reviews ensued for him, Peter Claffey (as Ser Duncan the Tall), and the entire show. It was pegged as a light-hearted departure from the doom and gloom of Thrones and House of the Dragon, and the verdict was pretty unanimous: it worked.
The season two shoot is already underway in Ireland, where Ansell is calling from. His head is freshly shaved and that same cheeky, yet surprisingly eloquent Egg-ness immediately comes through over our half-hour interview. Ansell’s mother, Debbie, sits just off-camera. She’s on hand for when the actor can’t quite conjure up particular details from his booming career (which of course he can’t help — he was four when this all began, remember?)
But the last six months are clear as day for Ansell, who has just been named IMDb’s youngest-ever STARmeter Award recipient. He’s still reeling from the premieres, the parties and, he tells THR, a recently-made WhatsApp gif of his character, which his friends are “spamming” their group chats with.
His depiction of Dunk’s tenacious sidekick received George R. R. Martin’s approval early on in the process (Seven Kingdoms is based on Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas). He recalls meeting the fantasy legend: “He’s very happy. He didn’t give me any advice. He said, ‘You look and sound like you just jumped out of the books.’ That was fun.” Ansell adds about the graphic novel adaptations of Dunk and Egg: “If you actually look at the drawings, which were drawn, like, five years before I was born — they could have made it then, but they didn’t. They waited for me,” he teases, putting two hands under his chin and looking up like a cherub in a Renaissance painting. “But those drawings of Egg look exactly like me.”
Ansell finds he has a lot in common with the character personality-wise, too. “He has lots of humor, and he’s very funny, like me. I can be quite funny sometimes.” THR can concur. Though playing Egg also came with some hurdles: “There were some really hard moments where I had to juggle being a Targaryen and being just a stable boy, and if you watch season one, you can see the little moments where I’m juggling Targaryen-ness and squire-ness. That was a lot of hard work [I put] into that.”
He’s truly putting his own spin on Egg, given that he can’t pull much inspiration from Game of Thrones — very much an adult watch — and has only seen clips of House of the Dragon (mostly the ones where dragons feature, though he did catch the recent, epic Battle of the Gullet). It does help, however, that he’s acquired a true friend in Claffey. In fact, this is what Ansell describes as the highlight of his Seven Kingdoms journey so far. “[The best part is] probably hanging out with Peter. A few weeks ago, he came to my house, and we had a weekend when the national horse race stuff [the U.K.’s Grand National] was on… He’s a really good singer,” he says when we ask what audiences might be surprised to find out about Claffey, “and he plays the guitar really well. We can both sing, so we should write some songs and make an album,” he declares. “Call it Double Trouble!”
Naturally, we’re keen to find out what we can about the second instalment of Seven Kingdoms, but this young actor is already an absolute pro. “I’m having a lot of fun, but if you really want to know more, there is a book!” is his diplomatic response. He emphasizes again: “There’s a book, and if you want to know more, just read it.”
The purpose of our call isn’t actually to discuss A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, though it comes up almost immediately in the context of Ansell’s endlessly impressive year. Out in U.K. cinemas on Friday, June 26 is 500 Miles, a feature film adaptation of Mark Lowery’s novel Charlie and Me by Malcolm Campbell, directed by Morgan Matthews. “I really wanted to do a good feature film — a good independent film,” says Ansell. “So I was like, ‘This is great. I love the story, I loved the character I was playing, so I thought, ‘Let’s do it.’”
In this heart-wrenching blend of British and Irish cinema, Ansell plays a young boy named Charlie. With his older brother Finn (Jojo Rabbit‘s Roman Griffin Davis), the siblings embark on the 500-mile journey from Sheffield to the west coast of Ireland to visit their estranged grandfather John (Bill Nighy), in the hope he can knit their broken family back together. It must have been a no-brainer for the casting directors — and Debbie, who reads the scripts before passing them on to her son — when Ansell’s audition tape came through; he and Charlie are similarly spirited, sassy, and light up a room.
“It was a lot of ad-libbing, actually,” says Ansell. “Obviously, the scripts are there, but they all let us throw in some words now and then, and I like that. But Charlie is fun, he is very cheeky, he wants to get his own way, but he’s also not aware of everything. I wouldn’t say he’s very intelligent at times.”
Unsurprisingly, the ad-libbing didn’t throw him at all. Ansell relished it, though at just 11, each set continues to be a real learning experience. “Every day you learn more, no matter who you are, you can always learn more, and every single day working with Peter [Claffey] and Bill Nighy and Maisie Williams and all these amazing people, it’s a great experience,” he says. “People are such great actors, and they teach you stuff, and then everyone bounces off of each other.”
He admits he didn’t know much about legendary British actor Nighy before signing on, but he’s firmly on that train now: “I knew he was massive. I was like, ‘Oh, he sounds great, let’s see.’ And then I was like, ‘Okay, wow, he’s amazing.’ In the middle of [the shoot] when we’re resting, he all of a sudden does a speech about life, and it’s amazing.” Did Nighy happen to offer the young talent any advice? “He said, ‘Pay your taxes, don’t smoke, don’t do any of that bad stuff.’ And obviously, I wouldn’t do that anyway, but it was so nice for someone else to say that,” beams Ansell.
It was also something of a Thrones universe crossover with Williams, best known as Stark sibling Arya in Game of Thrones, who plays a young Irish busker the boys pick up on their way to their grandfather’s. “We talked a bit [about the franchise],” says Ansell. “And it was very fun to say, ‘Oh, we want a dragon.’ But we didn’t talk too much about that. It was mainly about 500 Miles.”
Beyond 500 Miles? Ansell is shooting for the stars. He lists Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and “the king of comedy” Jim Carrey as his top three favorite actors, and is desperate to work with Steven Spielberg one day (he’s seen Disclosure Day, and loved it). But with Carell and the cast of Ansell’s favorite show, Stranger Things, already ticked off, he’s keen to keep juggling as much as he can. “What I’d love to do is five [seasons of Seven Kingdoms], and then in between each one, do a feature film,” he tells THR.
With the combination of ambition and talent that Ansell possesses, it’s hard to imagine this kid is destined for anything other than greatness. Right now, the wise-beyond-his-years actor is just hoping 500 Miles has the profound impact on its audiences that it’s intending to: “I hope they see [that] whatever happens in your life, your family is always there to protect you. Your family is always family, and you’ve got to keep close to all of them. Be kind to them. If you’re bickering with your siblings, no matter what, you’ve always got to keep them close.”
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