The following incorporates spoilers from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power‘s Season 1 finale. Proceed accordingly.
With The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power revealing a key half of The Stranger’s id in Thursday’s Season 1 finale, we’re one step nearer to studying who he actually is.
The large second got here throughout a confrontation with the mystics, who believed him to be their grasp Sauron. But the Stranger protected his Harfoot mates (which included Nori, Poppy, Marigold and Sadoc), proving that he wasn’t the Dark Lord however moderately, “the other one.” He was an Istari, aka a wizard.
That reveal additionally caught the Stranger’s portrayer, Daniel Weyman, without warning, as a result of he didn’t know who he was enjoying till simply earlier than filming the finale.
“I sat there, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ because I didn’t know either way they were going,” Weyman tells TVLine. “I knew that he was able to harness some power from the natural world, so he had to be some sort of Maiar. But how it was going to land, I didn’t know. So, when I read that part, I was like, ‘No way! That’s who I am. All right! Here we go.’ It was an amazing moment.”
When Nori identified that she overheard the mystics name him “Istari,” it was the Stranger who used the phrase “wizard” to self-identify.
“We can see him thinking, trying to find that word but this other word’s there,” Weyman explains. “The ‘wizard’ word comes out in a very difficult, slightly shady memory sort of way.” And as a result of the Stranger had no recollection of who he was, Weyman felt that he didn’t want know who precisely he was enjoying prematurely and located the secrecy to be releasing.
“The very exciting stuff that I have had, we’re starting from a blank slate,” he shared. “If somebody had said to me, ‘In that first scene in the crater, you need to be playing [for example] Sauron,’ then that would have colored everything that I had gone through. We could see him figure stuff out and I didn’t have to project something onto it, and that didn’t get in the way of me experiencing the present.”
With the thriller surrounding the Stranger spanning the complete first season, followers have been filling within the blanks with their very own theories about his true id — from Gandalf the Grey to Saruman the White to the nature-loving Radagast the Brown. Whether any of these guesses are right stays to be seen, however the Rings of Power actor is thrilled to see the viewers so engaged.
“One of the things that I loved about this season was watching and listening to how the audience has taken their ownership and knowledge of Tolkien’s stories, and they’ve brought that into our world created for the telly… And that has informed them of who they think this character is actually going to be,” he says.
Who the Stranger is “might be somebody totally brand new, or it might be a named character in canon.” So does that imply Weyman nonetheless doesn’t know precisely who he’s enjoying simply but? According to the actor, “nobody knows what the Stranger is, other than what they’ve met.”
Nori, who’s spent vital time with him, has the closest concept of what the Stranger is. Others, in the meantime, might have “felt some change in the atmosphere or the energy of the world that they live in, but might not know anything about it yet. I think we’re going with that nobody in the world of Middle-earth knows the identity past the Stranger, and that certainly includes me [the actor].”
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