The 25-year-old former child star will play a warrior on Game of Thrones this season, and she’s taking back the reins.
Keisha Castle-Hughes as Obara Sand on Game of Thrones.
Helen Sloan / HBO
There were two months of secrecy before Keisha Castle-Hughes could tell anyone she had been cast on Game of Thrones. "That was one of the most excruciating times of my life," she said, the agony keening. "You know that you've just bagged one of the most exciting roles of your life, and you can't tell anyone!"
And this coming from a woman who was nominated for an Oscar for her debut performance in 2002's Whale Rider when she was just 13. Now 25, the former child star spent part of last summer making covert trips to Belfast for armor fittings and martial arts training to portray the vengeful warrior Obara Sand. "All of a sudden, my friends were like, what are you doing? I was like, oh, you know, I'm studying wushu," she recalled in an interview with BuzzFeed News at a Los Angeles café.
Initially, Castle-Hughes thought she was wrong for Obara, who joins Game of Thrones in the May 3 installment, along with her sisters, Tyene (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) and Nymeria (Jessica Henwick). Obara is tall, brutish, and ugly. Castle-Hughes, who was dressed inconspicuously in shades of gray on this April afternoon, is tiny, delicate, and beautiful. But she said the creators didn't care about the physicality, just the acting, and so the petite actor became the toughest of the vengeful Sand Snakes from the desert kingdom of Dorne.
And she was excited. Reading for the stoic Sand Snake, Castle-Hughes said she was seized by the feeling that this is someone that I know. "She's got a very masculine energy to her," she said. Obara and her sisters have lost their beloved father; this season, they seek retribution for his death.
Becoming a warrior was a stretch for Castle-Hughes, and the harsh crack of Nymeria's bullwhip came as a shock to her. She would gasp every single time she heard it, she said, gasping three times as she told the story. "I don't know if you've ever heard a bullwhip crack, but it's like, the loudest thing in the world," she explained. But a warrior can't flinch — not on camera — and so she got used to it, eventually finding it soothing.
"You intensely learn everything it is possible to know about being a warrior monk in a made-up world," she said. "And then you move on." It can make her feel odd, she said, when she meets people who actually dedicate their lives to a discipline and she can say, "'Oh, yeah, I did an eight-week crash course in that.'" Nevertheless, she now knows something of wushu, and how to move with a weapon that is an extension of herself.
HBO
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