Robert Aramayo talks working on Game of Thrones vs The Rings of Power

Calling all casting directors: if you’re looking for an actor to play a younger version of a beloved fantasy character, look no further than Robert Aramayo. You may recognize him as the actor who portrayed young Ned Stark in Game of Thrones season 6. And soon we’ll all know him as “young” Elrond in Amazon’s The Rings of Power.

Playing a younger version of a popular character is always tricky, since they have to live up to the performance of the original actor. And Aramayo has done it twice: getting compared first to Sean Bean on Thrones and now Hugo Weaving — who played Elrond in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies — in The Rings of Power.

Interestingly, when Aramayo first auditioned for a role in the show, he had no idea that he was in the running to play Elrond. “I had one of those moments where everything in your body feels like you’re on electricity,” he told Variety. “I was shocked and surprised and felt really, really honored that they will consider me for him.”

Needless to say, once he got the part, he dived into the lore of Middle-earth by poring over The Silmarilion, which is less the type of book you read but more the kind you study. He believes that the TV show is faithful to the source material. Phew!

"I mean, it’s a very sparse age. You have sort of certain plots on the graph, and it’s the boys’ and our job to navigate one plot point to another. As a fan of Tolkien, I like to imagine when I’m reading how a character may have felt in that moment, why a character did a certain thing, how a character ended up over there when we don’t know when they left here. We get to make choices like that. I hope they enjoy our choices. I’ve had so many conversations with the boys where they always listen to anything that I feel passionate about with the legendarium. We’ll talk about choices that he’s going to make, and this route he’s going to take, and how that historical event may have affected this. As much as we can, at the base of it all, is [Tolkien’s] spirit, the essence of him, hopefully."

Robert Aramayo compares The Rings of Power to Game of Thrones

Comparing his time on Game of Thrones to his latest fantasy foray, Aramayo said that the biggest similarity is the extreme level of secrecy. “I don’t have any social media, and I try my best to stay away from stuff.”

On Game of Thrones, Aramayo had to keep one of the show’s biggest secrets: that Jon Snow was the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. “It was Season 6, and there was so much zeitgeist around the show,” he said. “So even that I was in it was a big secret. And then, obviously, what it revealed, I could never ever talk about.”

"They’re very, very different shows. My job on that and my job on this were very different. There, I was recreating the young Ned that we all knew and saw. That was the job. Whereas here, it’s way more important to the boys — and this is what I love about them — for me to study First Age stuff, and bring the legendarium to the table in this interpretation."

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres September 2 on Amazon Prime!

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