Hell may have no fury quite like a Game of Thrones actor scorned. Who wouldn’t be upset at being written off one of the most popular shows on TV? Back in Season 5, actor Ian McElhinney was vocally annoyed when his character, Ser Barristan Selmy, was killed off long before the book version kicked the bucket. Now it’s a Dornishman’s turn. Actor Alexander Siddig—beloved by many for his years on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—abruptly met his end at the start of Season 6. But, according to Sidding, that wasn’t always the plan.

Speaking with StarTrek.com, Siddig admitted that originally being cast on the show as Prince Doran Martell was a thrill to him. “It was such a huge thing, and there was so much publicity money,” he recalls. “That’s what I remember, everything was so huge. And actors praying they weren’t going to be killed.”

But no amount of praying could save Siddig from Season 6, Episode 1, in which his character took a dagger to the chest and bled out on the exquisite flagstones of Dorne. The abrupt murder—accompanied by the even swifter deaths of Areoh Hotah and Prince Trystane—came as a shock to viewers but, perhaps, not an unpleasant one. That triple homicide essentially cut Dorne out of the Season 6 plot, and, given how unpopular that location was the year before, that may have been the point.

Show-runners Weiss and Benioff called the actor during the off-season and, as Siddig recalls, said, “So we were going to kill you off at the end of last season [5], but we decided that we’re going to have to kill you off at the beginning of next season [6].” Siddig calls that explanation “wrong”: the actor says he had been contracted for four episodes of Season 6, not one. “If they were going to kill me off at the end of the last season, why would they contract me for those four episodes? Because it costs them money whether I do them or not, so it’s not great business sense to do it just in case.”

Were Dorne and its prince originally meant to play a much bigger role in the narrative going forward? That’s certainly the case in the books, where Doran is still alive and well and plotting against the Lannisters. If Game of Thrones were looking to get rid of the least popular elements of its Dorne plot, though, Doran, Trystane, and Hotah weren’t exactly the first candidates that come to mind. Siddig, for his part, has no end of suggestions about what might have motivated his earlier exit: