Curtain Call: Kristian Nairn
By Ani Bundel
"“Hodor” – Hodor"
It is with a heavy heart that I write this Curtain Call. Hodor was a character beloved across cultures, countries, and fandoms. The mononymed oversized innocent, who may or may not have been distantly related to giants, represented something rare in Westeros: a character with no self-interested motivation. One might say that he and Littlefinger are exact opposites. While Littlefinger charms with words, all the while only concerned with his own ambition, Hodor charmed with only a single word, and his utter loyalty and devotion was unmatched by anyone else on the show.
Northern Irish actor Kristian Nairn did more with Hodor than any actor probably had any right to. He admitted up front that when he first auditioned for the role, he was wary that it might play into a stereotype he’d been fighting against his whole career. (“People sincerely believe that when you’re 7 feet tall and look like me, you’re stupid.”) He might have turned it down too, but his mother, who was a fan of the books, and knew what a beloved character this was on the page, convinced him to go for it. The resulting performance was quite remarkable. Over the course of five years, Nairn made an entire vocabulary out of a single two-syllable word. You know that character in fantasy who seems to be talking gibberish, but his friends understand him perfectly every time? That was Hodor for every one of us sitting at home. We always knew what he meant.
Nairn didn’t just make Hodor, Hodor made Nairn. In Season 5, when Hodor sat the year out, Nairn took his other passion in life—music—and went DJing across the globe under the banner “Rave of Thrones.” He released three singles over the course of last year on Radikal Records, and will leave the show with a second career already underway.
And Nairn’s portrayal of Hodor’s death this past Sunday wasn’t just a heartbreaker; it was a milestone. For years, we book-readers have always known to expect the shocking deaths before they occur. When Ned Stark died and show-only watchers screamed and cried and demanded to know why, we book-readers nodded to ourselves, and perhaps sighed with relief. We had worried the show wouldn’t have the nerve to go there, that they would let Ned live, and ruin everything. Now we knew: the show had the stones, and it would all be okay. When the Red Wedding came, we were even worse. Those of us who knew it was coming turned our cameras on the show- only watchers and posted their horror to YouTube for our own grotesque enjoyment, and turned it into memes.
But this time, now one knew what was coming ahead of time, and we book-readers got to learn what it was like to live through a Red Wedding-type moment for ourselves.
Nairn gave us that moment. His performance allowed us to open our hearts to him and forget that he was as vulnerable as everyone else. One of the tricks that Game of Thrones pulls on the viewers, over and over again, is to lull us into a sense of complacency about certain characters, to make us forget that our favorite could die at any time. Hodor’s survival was such a given that I actually read a spoiler the morning of the episode that said “Meera and Bran get away in a last minute down to the wire battle”….and I STILL didn’t realize that Hodor wouldn’t survive.
But that’s the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Narin’s two current EPs are available on iTunes for all of $7 for the pair. I highly recommend picking them up if you’re a fan of EDM, and I look forward to hitting the club the next time Nairn tours the states.