‘Game of Thrones’: Hodor Returns to Hold Doors and Take Orders in New KFC Commercial

“Chicken with fries, please!” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “hold the door,” but the food-forward phrase nevertheless haunts erstwhile Game of Thrones actor Kristian Nairn’s waking nightmare in a new commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The video features the man who once played Hodor, the loyal House Stark servant with a heart of gold and a vocabulary of one, now occupying a new role: taking orders at the local KFC. A bevy of customers walk through the door at noon sharp, all demanding the same order: “Chicken with fries, please!” The moment becomes all the more overwhelming as those words swirl throughout the occasional Hodor’s mind, eventually racing out of his own mouth, and even later combining into … well, it’s not a word that’s as iconic as “Hodor,” but it gets the job done.

Watch the commercial in the video below.

Nairn starred as Hodor on five seasons of Game of Thrones, but was completely absent from season five thanks to the decision to put the Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) story on ice for a year. When Bran and Hodor returned in season six, it was with one of the most devastating twists in the show’s history. Bran, who had been learning how to harness his magical abilities at the knee of the mystical Three-Eyed Raven (Max von Sydow), traveled back in time and unwittingly chicken-and-fried a younger version of Hodor’s brain by linking it with the present-day Hodor, who was in the process of getting torn apart by wights as he enacted his final order: “Hold the door!”

“I think now it has nostalgia,” Nairn told The Hollywood Reporter about the new meaning of the word “Hodor,” in an interview conducted shortly after the character’s onscreen demise. “Of all the meanings it’s had in the past … it’s meant so many things to Hodor, and so many things to everybody else. Now, knowing what it means for real, I think people will hold onto Hodor as a multi-function word. I certainly will still use it that way.”

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Game of Thrones returns July 16.