Curtain Call: Natalia Tena

“I was never a prefect myself. My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities…. Like the ability to behave myself.” —Tonks, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Natalia Tena seems to be pigeon-holed when it comes to her roles in fantasy movies and television shows. She’s always the Hufflepuff, loyal to the bone, but with a bad girl streak a mile wide and the inability to behave herself.

That certainly sums up her character of Osha, who was introduced all the way back in Season 1, and has been something of a through-line throughout the story of Winterfell. She was part of the “downstairs” formed by Hodor and Maester Luwin and Old Nan, as opposed to the “upstairs” formed by the members of the Stark family proper. She was also a reminder that there was something north of the Wall so dangerous enough that a wildling raised there is willing to work as a slave in a house run by her ancestral enemies rather than go home.

Osha’s connection to the Stark boys started to become obvious at the end of Season 1, after they both intuit that their father is dead. Does she understand they are warging, or that the family has a connection to the wolves? Unlike most people in Westeros, wildlings know that warging is a true thing that happens. They are also far more open-minded, having not had their heads filled with parables from The Seven Pointed Star—north of the Wall, the Old Gods still hold sway. Even before Jon joins the wildling crew in Season 3, Osha had been laying the groundwork for the culture he finds there.

It’s Osha’s big heart and keen intelligence that allows her to escape Winterfell with Bran and Rickon in Season 2, but the same tricks fail her when she returns to confront Ramsay Bolton in Season 6. Before her surprise arrival on the Bolton’s doorstep, Osha hadn’t been seen since Season 3. One would hope that she would have gotten more than five minutes of screen time before dying, but that’s Game of Thrones for you. The moment she steps in to Ramsay’s chamber and sneers that he’s just another lord, you could already tell she was underestimating him. Her hilarious reference to the Thenns notwithstanding, she thought that the people “upstairs’ were all the same. Soft. But Ramsay was no Theon. (Ironically, Osha’s tactics might have worked if Ramsay hadn’t tortured Theon for all the information he was worth, which included intel on how the wildling girl had bamboozled him before).

Poor Osha. Had she had her wand and Mad-Eyed Moody to train her….nah, she still would have died. Raise your wands for Tena.