DeObia Oparei talks about Areo Hotah’s role on Game of Thrones Season 6

DeObia Oparei, the English actor who played Areo Hotah on Game of Thrones Season 5, recently talked to Zap2It about Hotah’s role in Season 6.

Okay, before we get to anything else, the revelation that Hotah will even have a role in Season 6 is news by itself. In Season 5, the producers introduced Hotah—the captain of Prince Doran Martell’s Dornish guard—along with a bunch of other characters from Dorne. To put it mildly, the new characters were poorly received, and it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Season 6 would pick up their stories at all. However, if a relatively minor character like Hotah is returning, we can probably expect to check in with the likes of Doran Martell, Ellaria Sand, and the Sand Snakes as well. If this news pleases you, I’m glad. If you’re screaming internally, I apologize.

Trystane Martell, Dorne’s one-man boy band.

Ono character we’ll almost definitely spend more time with is Doran’s son Trystane Martell, since he was on a boat bound for King’s Landing when we last saw him in “Mother’s Mercy.” Also on board that boat: Jaime Lannister and Myrcella Baratheon, the latter of whom died during the voyage, a victim of a slow-acting poison delivered by Ellaria Sand, Trystane’s vengeful sort-of-aunt-in-law. When Zap2It asked Oparai about the biggest question surrounding Season 6 (non-Jon Snow division), he brought up Trystane.

"What are they going to do with him? Are they going to kill him? Are they going to take him back to King’s Landing and kill him? What’s going to happen to him, and then how does that impact Dorne? Is there going to be war, because our boy’s on that boat sailing into danger?"

Oparai doesn’t know the answers to these questions any more than we do, as he hasn’t read his Season 6 scripts yet. He has a late call to the set, so he’s guessing he’s not going to have a lot of screen time in Season 6. Still, he didn’t have a lot of screen time in Season 5, either, and having limited time in front of the camera doesn’t mean he can’t have an impact. “I’ve seen people come into the show, they just shoot for one week, and you look at the season and that storyline is the most memorable,” he said. “It’s not often about quantity with this show because they set such incredible escapades that the most memorable thing in the whole season could be one or two scenes with a character that was only in one ep.”

If you ask him, Oparei is hoping that Season 6 will let Hotah make more use of that deadly-looking axe he carries around. The actor also revealed that, although he hasn’t been on set yet, costars Indira Varma, Keisha Castle-Hughes, and Jessica Henwick (Ellaria, Obara, and Nymeria Sand respectively) have been keeping him in the loop, backstage gossip-wise. This implies that those actresses have already filmed material, or that they’ve at least read their scripts. Either way, it’s more evidence that Ellaria and the Sand Snakes will return next year, like it or not.

What will the Dornish crew do should they come back for Season 6? That’s a harder question to answer. The books offer some suggestions about what the Sand Snakes might get up to in the next novel, but on the show, their involvement in Myrcella’s murder puts their futures in question. As for Hotah, we can probably expect him to remain strong, silent, and imposing. He was one of the few things about Dorne that fans had no problems with, so maybe he should just keep doing what he’s been doing.

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