Game of Thrones has already gotten into the throes of producing Season 6, and this week we learned that an unlikely character will be returning to the series, just maybe not in the way you might think. This week, we learned that Ned Stark will be returning to the cast of the hit HBO fantasy drama, although it will be a younger version of the character than we saw in Season 1. Reports indicate that Sebastian Croft will be playing young Ned Stark on Game of Thrones
Here’s what we know. A few weeks ago, casting calls indicated that Game of Thrones will be adding a slew of new players for Season 6. Although the subscription cable network has not gone out of its way to release a ton of the casting information as it has in prior years—we do know Ian McShane has been added—the casting descriptions have given us huge clues regarding some of the characters who are coming up. Watchers on the Wall reports the show is looking for a Northern boy with “brown hair” and a “narrow face,” indicating a young Ned Stark, and now reports indicate Stark has indeed been cast.
In his short career, the English actor has been in a ton of stage plays, including Les Miserables, but this looks to be his big American TV break, which should be a pretty good one. Now, Sebastian Croft is 13 and will be playing Ned as a young swordsman. The initial casting description indicates that he’ll be practicing swordsmanship with an older boy during the scene.
This won’t be the first time that Game of Thrones will be incorporating flashbacks. In fact, the drama kicked off with a pretty atmospheric scene at the beginning of Season 5, during which a young Cersei met Maggie the Frog and learned about her future fate from the fortune-teller. Flashbacks have served to fill in some of the historical information in the series and to give our characters richer backgrounds, but since Ned Stark has long been dead on Game of Thrones (and he died in a grisly, never-to-return manner), I’m a little surprised that we will be getting more information about the teenaged version of that specific character. I’m also more than a little intrigued about where the flashbacks in Season 6 will go.
While we haven’t gotten a ton of information regarding what is coming up during Season 6, there will still be quite a while before the new episodes are set to hit the schedule in 2016. In the meantime, you can check out all of the juicy tidbits we’ve learned so far here. We also have the latest on when Game of Thrones will end.
