Hlomla Dandala Reveals Why He Left ‘The River’! For the past couple of months, Hlomla Dandala stole hearts again as the leading man Zweli Dikana on the hit award winning telenovela ‘The River’ but fans were shocked and left disappointed when news recently broke that he was leaving the show.
The actor went on Newsroom Afrika to talk about his exit and what led to it. “It was time. Generally what tends to happen with any career, if you stay in any character for long enough it’s very difficult to then pivot away from it or to be perceived in any other way. If you’ve established yourself as a leading man and you play something that establishes you as being quite weaker and kow-towing, being the fool…. if you don’t get out of that fast enough, it gets harder and harder over time,” he explained.
“With ‘The River’, one was happy with the character for a long time then after a while we started growing further and further apart in terms of creativity. It reached a point where I said, ‘Look, I need to manage my career’. Part of that is I don’t want to get stuck into a situation that I don’t want to be in long term. It starts to damage your future, as an actor,” Hlomla added.
Hlomla alongside Sindi Dlathu have led the show to being one of the most watched proudly South African TV shows, a casting pair one of the producers admitted had been in plan since 2012. Speaking on one the reasons he left the show, Hlomla said it had something to do with the dynamic between his character and Sindi Dlathu’s.
“The producers were generous enough to understand what I was saying. They were stuck between a rock and a hard place in that the structure of the show requires that one is duped and the other is duping… eternally for the structure of the show. Now you have an actor who is saying, ‘Listen, I can’t be duped for five years straight. It starts to comment on me as an actor. It starts to affect my other work and so you know, it’s just one of those. And it’s natural, it’s the natural evolution of any show,” Hlomla said.
Hlomla went down memory lane to some of his iconic characters including Derick Nyathi on Isidingo saying he’s always treated his career that way to avoid being type cast.
