Fans of The Kingkiller Chronicle have been waiting over a decade for The Doors of Stone, and becoming more impatient as the wait stretches on. Still, the series remains popular, which means that there are attempts to bring the story to the screen. Back in 2015, Lionsgate had plans to create a TV show, movies, and even video games based on the property. And in 2017, Showtime was working on a prequel TV show with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda as executive producer and John Rogers writing the scripts. However, all of those projects ran into problems, which gives fans another thing to wait for.
Still, it’s easy to get excited about a screen adaptation, especially when it comes to picking actors. For author Patrick Rothfuss, the idea is daunting, although thoughts have occurred to him from time to time.
“I don’t have a dream cast in my head,” he said during a panel at PAX 2017 that recently went up on The Eolian YouTube channel. “I’m like, ‘I like Nathan Fillion,’ and so I’m like ‘Who should he be?’ But that’s not how casting should work. It’s really like way harder than that.”
That said, there’s one actor Rothfuss did have his eye on: Lin-Manuel Miranda himself! “He would be a good Elodin, that would be funny as hell,” Rothfuss said, referring to the Master Namer at the University where lead character Kvothe learns magic. He also has “no problem with” David Tennant being Elodin as one fan suggested, but clearly would prefer someone else.
Miranda already has experience in fantasy. He played Lee Scoresby in the BBC’s adaptation of His Dark Materials, the classic series of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman. Of course, Rothfuss talked about him playing Elodin back when that prequel TV show was still going forward. Since then, Miranda has said that the series is “still a code that’s waiting to be cracked.”
Patrick Rothfuss doesn’t think The Name of the Wind is “movie-shaped”
Normally with fantasy adaptations, there are tons of hints and teasers leading up to premiere day. Of course, nothing involving The Kingkiller Chronicle has made much progress, so there’s not much to talk about. And even if there was, Rothfuss is hesitant to chat about it in fear he might spill the beans and create legal trouble.
“The only reason I don’t constantly talk about it, and I haven’t for years, is that in some ways it’s been illegal because I’m under contract and there’s NDAs,” he said earlier this year. “But more importantly it’d be rude to talk about certain things because it makes it hard for people to do good promotion and all of that stuff. So, there have been talks. In some ways it’s a lot of author’s dreams to get that deal. I will say it was never my dream. And I’ve actually deliberately refused deals literally for years because Name of the Wind isn’t movie-shaped and they could not do it.”
"I’ve now been in writer’s rooms. I’ve read and given notes and treatments and done a bunch of stuff. Both for my own project and other stuff. It’s a weird world man."
Overall, it sounds like things are moving ahead slowly but surely. I would imagine that when the final book, The Doors of Stone, is out, things will go much faster. In the meantime, Rothfuss continues to reveal small details about the third book in his trilogy.
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