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. With the show already half over, and the worldwide phenomenon factor making 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, who at times seem to be determined to have the biggest A-list cast ever assembled over the course of seven and a half seasons. 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 guest turns in MI-5 and David Suchet’s Poirot series, to recurring parts in 24 and Primeval.

 

The role he’d been cast in on Game of Thrones was a difficult one as well. As book readers know, Doran is a man who doesn’t do a lot of action. he’s a cripple, confined to a wheelchair. He must radiate strength and power while not doing much movement, 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 in the one moment he was allowed to do this–in the scene between Jaime Lannister and Doran in Season 5 episode 9, it was perhaps the best scene in Dorne of the whole season.

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 will 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, feeble, someone to be sat out like a pretty prop against pretty sets to do very little, and then to be uselessly killed off early and often after the audience’s reactions to Dorne as a whole were so unfavorable.

But 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, thought the vast distances have made it so that he doesn’t know that yet. Perhaps his death will be coming soon on the page too, a failure of a ruler who put hope in Quentyn and Arianne Martell, who were both disappointments on the page and both cut in the show. Until then, we have only the bitter regrets on screen to taste, as we thinks about what could have been, and sigh heavily at a Dorne storyline that will no longer have the A list heavy to anchor what little respect it deserved.

Via https://winteriscoming.net/2016/04/26/curtain-call-alexander-siddig/