One actor will not return for the seventh season of Game of Thrones, and not because a character was brutally killed off. When viewers see Samwell Tarly and his family in upcoming episodes, his newly introduced brother Dickon will have a different face.
Original actor Freddie Stroma confirmed to IGN that he’d not be returning to Westeros for the acclaimed series, indicating that commitments to his new show Time After Time on ABC prevented his appearance.
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“I was shooting this, so my character, I wouldn’t be able to go back now,” Stroma said while attending the 2017 winter TV Critics Association. “It was still fun. I got to be in that world. I’ve watched all of it. It’s just an incredible TV show.”
The character debuted alongside other Tarly family members in the sixth episode of season six, “Blood Of My Blood,” in which Samwell’s cranky dad made his presence felt. But Dickon has since been recast, according to the Game of Thrones-centric site the Watchers on the Wall, as Black Sails’ Tom Hopper joins the program.
Stroma indicated that he was grateful to be seen in George R. R. Martin and HBO‘s sprawling fantasy epic.
“Even just to get such a toe in there is fun,” Stroma said. “Just to be on set and kind of feel like I was in that world, I was a fan sitting there at the table doing that scene.”
But instead Stroma is trading the Fantasy genre for Sci-Fi, starring as the author H.G. Wells in ABC’s adaptation of Karl Alexander’s novel Time After Time which will debut on television March 5th.
