Dorne keeps striking back: Alexander Siddig and Keisha Castle-Hughes talk Season 5

We’re over halfway through Game of Thrones’ fifth season, and many feel that they’ve seen enough of the Dornish storyline to form an opinion on it, and that opinion is that it’s dumb. Nevertheless, the players behind the new Dornish characters—including Alexander Siddig as Doran Martell and Keisha Castle-Hughes as Obara Sand—keep hitting the press circuit aggressively. Siddig, for example, recently gave an interview for Hunger TV, the latest in a series of profiles the publication has done on people like Deobia Oparei,  Toby Sebastian, and Jessica Henwick.

Siddig is a TV veteran who starred on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for seven years, and he had a lot of insights into how the TV landscape has changed over the course of his career. “There’s a massive shift, a tectonic shift,” he said. “Everyone’s fleeing to TV because people have the stamina to watch 24-hour movies…It’s down to there being an increase in money and talent for television – amazing new writers and producers coming into the business. The onset of video on demand, various digital download formats and that whole digital revolution, it’s the perfect storm for creating a world where TV is just ideal.”

This echos what a lot of critics have had to say about the current “golden age” of TV, an age that’s directly responsible for lavish shows like Game of Thrones. Siddig notes, however, that being the star on a show like Deep Space Nine—a time when he was “treated like royalty”—is very different from being one in a cast of many on Game of Thrones. Apparently, when he was on Star Trek, people would brush his teeth for him. That’s celebrity, right here.

Unfortunately, Siddig doesn’t offer as much insight into what’s next for the Dornish plotlines, as he was interviewed after he had only done two week’s worth of filming. He summarized the drama we’ve seen play out over the last couple of weeks, the one where Doran has been under pressure to go to war, but he’s as in the dark as the rest of us as to where, if anywhere, it’s all going. “There’s this tension building and something’s going to blow,” he said. “I honestly don’t know whether they’re going to stab me in the back, poison me (as they really want to do) or whether I’m somehow going to hold them at bay while I get my shit together, before just hurtling into war and losing hundreds of thousands of people.”

He does offer a few more insights in his video interview. For example, he mentions that there’s an upcoming scene in which Doran and Jaime have a sit-down, something that could happen in Sunday’s forthcoming episode, now that Jaime’s cover, such as it was, has been blown.

Something else to note is Siddig’s talk about how interesting it would be if Doran formed an alliance with Daenerys. In the books, this is something that Doran is actively seeking, but Siddig talks about it as though it’s a wild idea, suggesting that he’s not seeking it on the show. Of course, he could just be playing coy.

Check out Siddig’s full interview, which has some great stories about his career beginnings and his audition for Game of Thrones, here.

Meanwhile, Keisha Castle-Hughes sat down with Vulture, where she discussed the fight scene between the Sand Snakes, Jaime, and Bronn from “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” Castle-Hughes talks about how she trained with a spear and studied the martial art of wushu in preparation for the fight, but that didn’t save it from landing with something of a thud, as critics dinged it for unexciting choreography and a lack of urgency. The fight between the Mountain and the Viper it wasn’t.

Castle-Hughes also had some interesting things to say about the Sand Snakes’ mentalities. Growing up how they did, she suggests, may have warped their perceptions of their own abilities, which would provide an explanation for why they thought it was a good idea to raid the Water Gardens in broad daylight without enough fighting skill between them to take down a mercenary and a one-handed knight.

I think the problem is, Dorne is so far removed from the rest of Westeros, it’s like living in Fantasyland. It’s always sunny! The Sand Snakes have the same issue. There’s a bit of naïveté about how much power they would have in the outside world. They were in a really lovely position, in the sense that they’re part of the royal family, so they can get away with running around and doing whatever they want to do, but they don’t have any commitments pending, because they’re bastards, so they don’t have any right to the throne.

Admittedly, that’s probably not the message the Game of Thrones producers are hoping viewers come away with, but as fan opinion turns against the Dornish storyline, a little damage control couldn’t hurt. We’ll see what the final four episodes of the season bring for the land located as far south as south goes.

• Published on 05/21/2015 at 2:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:04 PM CDT