Curtain Call: Alexander Siddig

“I know that you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better.” –Doran Martell, A Dance With Dragons.

Alexander Siddig was a late addition to the Game of Thrones family. He came on after the show was already half over, and the worldwide phenomenon factor made it so that anyone offered a prominent cameo role would be a fool to say no. Siddig himself was also a casting coup for the show, which at times seemed to be determined to assemble the biggest A-list cast ever possible. His nerd credentials may start with his role as Dr. Julian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but that’s only the beginning of a long list of high-end credits. The Sudanese born, British raised actor has been in everything from MI-5 and David Suchet’s Poirot series to 24 and Primeval.

The role he’d been cast in on Game of Thrones was a difficult one. As book-readers know, Doran is a man who doesn’t do action. He’s a cripple, confined to a wheelchair. He must radiate strength and power while not moving much, and spending his life mostly a helpless invalid. But if anyone was up to the task of this, Siddig seemed to be the one. And the one moment he was allowed to do this—the scene between Jaime Lannister and Doran in Season 5 episode 9—was perhaps the best scene in Dorne from Season 5.

How did it all go so wrong? How did Dorne go so wrong? Perhaps the answer lies in the quote above from A Dance with Dragons, one that Doran did not live to utter on the show, with his character’s life and his time on the production cut so short. “I know that you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble,” he says to the Sand Snakes. Oberyn, he says, knew better. he could have said the same thing to Benioff and Weiss. They mistook him for weak and feeble, someone to be sat out like a pretty prop against pretty sets, and then to be killed off early, after the audience had already reacted poorly to Dorne.

But George R.R. Martin knew better. It may have taken nearly two enormous tomes to get there, but Doran was a man with a plan for the long game. I come back to that moment between Siddig and Nikoalj Coster-Waldau in episode 9, because it was the only moment where Siddig got to shine in the part, but in that brief scene we saw what he could have done with the role, given time.

But time was not on his side. Not for the show, and in truth, not on the page. Doran’s long game plans on the page so far have only gone awry, though the vast distances involved mean he doesn’t know it yet. Perhaps his death will be coming soon on the page, a failure of a ruler who put too much hope in Quentyn and Arianne Martell, both of whom were cut in the show. Until then, we have only the bitter regrets on screen to taste, as we think about what could have been, if Siddig really had the opportunity to shine in the role.