Apparently actor Alexander Siddig who played Doran Martell’s role in ever popular HBO Game Of Thrones is not entirely happy about how his character had to abruptly end. Though he praised the crew and his on-set experience, he said that he wasn’t too thrilled with how Doran Martell suddenly got offed at the beginning of the sixth season.
Apparently, him getting killed so suddenly wasn’t part of the plan.
“There was an enormous amount of fan excitement when I got named to be on the show, and everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, yes, Doran Martell, he’s going to be great as Doran Martell’,” the actor told Startrek.com. “That might have been the kiss of death.
Maybe they didn’t want quite that much attention on that character. Maybe they thought, ‘Well, let’s prove that we’re going to stray from the books. We’re going to do something else, and he will be our first example of that’. So maybe that could have been the case. Or maybe I just screwed up. Maybe I said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”
Siddig’s Martell and his guard were murdered by Indira Varma’s character Ellaria Sand and one of her daughters in a shocking chain of events that also included the death of Martell’s son, Trystane, at the hands of Sand’s other two daughters.
In George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books, the Martells are still alive and active in several plotlines.
But in the end, he said it was a good thing he got offed, because Game of Thrones can really screw with an actor’s schedule. “You don’t earn as much as you would if you were doing another show, because they’re Game of Thrones, and they don’t have to pay anyone,” he said. “So it’s kind of a blessing in disguise.”