‘Game of Thrones’ season 6 spoilers: Ian McShane cast in mystery role

It is not entirely common (at all) for “Game of Thrones” to cast well-known actors in any of their roles, mostly because of the sole fact that they want their characters to be relatively unrecognizable. To us, there are only a small handful of people we were familiar with before the series began: Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, Sean Bean, Ciaran Hinds, and Keisha Castle-Hughes (and that was only because of one individual movie). It has made stars of Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, and others, but they were relative unknowns at the time in which they joined.

With this pattern in mind, the casting of “Deadwood” alum Ian McShane on the show is particularly intriguing to us. Entertainment Weekly was the first to report the actor’s casting (he is currently on Showtime’s “Ray Donovan”), and while the impression received is that this will be a brief role, it will be one of great importance to the franchise.

We don’t want to get too far down a spoiler rabbit hole here, but our hope would be that maybe he would be someone tied to the Targeryan or Stark family lineage that maybe has been mentioned, but never before seen to date. We also hope that this isn’t a flashback; save for the start of season 5 where we saw a younger Cersei the series has stayed away from that, and we would like for that to be saved for some sort of inevitable prequel series that will probably come once the original ends.

“Game of Thrones” is filming this summer; other castings have been hinted at, but few are confirmed by HBO.

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