Amazon “can’t afford to muck up” The Wheel of Time
By Dan Selcke
Amazon is about to premiere The Wheel of Time, its adaptation of Robert Jordan’s 14-book strong fantasy series. This is a big deal, cause this series has been around for decades and has tens of millions of fans the world over. Some have even written actor Rosamund Pike, who plays the Aes Sedai sorceress Moiraine, to say how much the series means to them. “Many of them have said that actually these women in The Wheel of Time were mentors and role models for them growing up, which I thought was very interesting,” she told The Telegraph.
So expectations are high, and Pike is mindful of the chance they have. “Amazon cannot afford to muck it up because it’s such a monumental piece of work,” she said. “They can’t let it fail. It’s so magnificent what they can achieve with it.”
We’ll cross our fingers and hope for the best.
The Wheel of Time will feature nudity, with more naked men than women
As for the show itself, it’s set in a world that was leveled long ago by male Aes Sedai sorcerers driven mad by the malevolent Dark One. Ages later, only women are allowed to access the “One Power,” and they’re careful not to let another man use it, because the Dark One’s plans have a long shadow, and they will eventually go mad, which could lead to another breaking.
Pike has done her homework on the books and on Jordan. “When I found out that Robert Jordan had been a helicopter gunner in Vietnam, I thought, oh, that’s where this big fantasy world originates,” she said. “That’s why he’s interested in men who had power and abused it and broke the world.”
Gender plays a big role in the story of The Wheel of Time, and the producers are likewise mindful of historic gender disparities in Hollywood. Take the nudity gap, for instance, where movies and TV shows tend to feature more nude women than men. The Wheel of Time is flipping that.
“You see many more naked men than you see naked women, which is quite pleasing, since women have been asked to expose themselves forever and a day,” Pike said. “We’ve got all the boys frantically dieting and working out hard for their naked scenes and all of the women going out for lovely dinners.”
Now, having read the first few Wheel of Time books, I’ll say I’m a little surprised that there’s nudity at all, cause the novels are fairly chaste, or at least the first couple that I’ve read are. But the show is being made in a post-Game of Thrones world, Game of Thrones being a show famous for gratuitous nudity early on. So if The Wheel of Time is going to have nudity, at least it’s doing it in a way that is moving the conversation forward.
The first three episodes of The Wheel of Time premiere on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, November 19. Here we go.
Next. Every actor cast in The Wheel of Time show, and who they’re playing. dark
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