British actor Joel Fry has been cast as Hizdahr zo Loraq, a main character in Daenerys Targaryen’s upcoming storyline. Warning for non-book readers: Unmarked spoilers (and one hidden major spoiler) for book five, A Dance with Dragons, are behind the cut.
Hizdahr is from one of the wealthy families in Meereen, a slave city Daenerys frees and hangs around to govern for pretty much all of A Dance with Dragons. If you’re going to rule Westeros you’d better have some practice, right? Unfortunately for Daenerys, while toppling a government is a relatively easy thing to do when one has dragons, building a new one on the ashes of slavery is decidedly not. Hizdahr claims he’s on her side but is actually working against her in some pretty major ways. She knows he’s a vain, manipulative skeezball, but he has wealth and connections that she doesn’t, so she’s forced to reluctantly welcome him as her ally [major spoiler] and eventual husband.
Fry has had supporting roles in 10,000 BC and Tamara Drewe and has appeared in several British TV shows as well. Time for Six Degrees of Game of Thrones: One of the shows, Trollied, stars Mark Addy, our dear departed wine-swilling, hammer-wielding, bastard-having Orson Welles lookalike Robert Baratheon.
Hizdahr zo Loraq doesn’t show up until book five, and chronology-wise when season four starts we’ll still be in the second half of book three. Books four and five cover the same time period but different characters, and it’s not like when the show finishes book three they’re just doing to drop all the characters who weren’t in book four (Daenerys, Tyrion, Jon, etc.) for a whole season. So it makes sense that Daenerys’ Meereen storyline would be introduced earlier than expected. I wonder how the show’s going to pace things out, though. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I found the majority of Dany’s A Dance with Dragons storyline more than a little bit boring. I understand the reason behind the pause in the action, but still.
(via: Entertainment Weekly)
Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
