The Rings of Power: Even the Stranger actor doesn’t know if he’s Gandalf

The season finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is now behind us, and it brought with it a few big reveals. The largest is the secret identity of Sauron. Despite spending much of the season trying to trick viewers into thinking it was the Stranger, an amnesiac meteor man who fell from the sky played by Daniel Weyman, in the end it was revealed that Halbrand was the true villain.

But who is the Stranger, then? The Rings of Power confirmed that he is an “istari,” another word for wizard. Despite the very obvious suggestion that he’s Gandalf — he even uses a few of the iconic wizard’s famous lines from The Lord of the Rings — the season finale stopped short of outright naming Weyman’s character.

As it turns out, not even Weyman himself knows for sure whether he’s playing Gandalf, and that’s just the way he likes it.

Daniel Weyman didn’t know if he was playing Gandalf while filming

“I think now we’re up to what I know about the character,” Weyman told Syfy Wire. “That’s all I’ve been given. I felt comfortable, when we were filming, to really learn it scene-by-scene, episode-by-episode because I didn’t need to know the future to play the character. The character came with nothing until the point at which he’s given some momentous insight. Now he knows he’s a wizard, now that that word resonates through time for him. Even before time itself as an idea came to being, he was sort of floating around in the ether. Until that really comes through into his core, I didn’t think he needed to know what the future is.”

When put more on the spot about whether the Stranger is Gandalf, Weyman emphasized that he really didn’t know, but that he trusted showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to give him the information he needed when he needed it.

“No, I think nobody in our world knows the identity of the Stranger, including the Stranger himself,” he said. “I’m actually much more excited by the honesty of that. I think we’ll get a much better performance from me and therefore the audience will understand the Stranger and be better able to empathize with his journey if that’s where I am.”

"The mystery of the Stranger and who the Stranger was growing into was enjoyable both for me to play day-to-day and also for the people watching it. Because there were certain things we knew we had to hit. Númenor will fall, at some point. Isildur will cut the Ring finger off, if we get that far. There are certain things in the lore that we know we’re going to have to hit. And the pockets of space where J.D. and Patrick are able to extrapolate and invent the extra ideas of Tolkien feel like real gems."

How did hanging out with the harfoots influence the Stranger’s personality?

The Stranger spent almost all his time this season with the harfoots, ancient hobbits who wandered Middle-earth in a nomadic nature-loving community. If the Stranger is Gandalf, then it would explain a lot about why the wizard has such an affinity for hobbits in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In the season finale, the white-robed women from Rhûn revealed that a veil had been placed upon the Stranger’s mind, preventing him from recalling his life before he fell. Yet as he battled to save his harfoot friends, the veil finally slipped, allowing him to speak in complete sentences and remember some things. It begs the question: how much of the Stranger’s newfound kindness and personality traits are remnants of his previous life, and how much is a result of him hanging around the cheerful Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) and her community?

“I think that is a really, really good question. The short answer is that I don’t really have definite points to tell you about that,” Weyman admitted. “I know that the last thing he says on the hillside to Nori is that fragments have come back — images and things like that. But, when we leave him in Episode 8, it’s not like he knows exactly everything. I think that’s where I am, certainly where the viewers are, and I’ll have to wait to see what [showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne] want to do with the second season and his journey going forward. It’s an exciting, fun place to be because it leaves so much open.”

Around halfway through the season, the harfoots go on their great migration. The Stranger chips in to help pull Nori’s family’s cart, since her father has injured his ankle. It’s the first moment where he starts to be accepted by more harfoots than just Nori. But since forced perspective scale work was done during the Stranger’s scenes to make him look larger than the harfoots, that meant there were different sized versions of the carts.

“I have to give a huge shoutout to my scale double, Paul Sturgess, who ended up having to pull the big, big carts for most of the time,” Weyman said. “Because, of course, [Markella Kavenagh], who played Nori, and her family unit, when they were pulling carts — those carts were too big for my scale, so Paul was the guy who had to pull an even bigger cart. When I had to pull a cart, it was actually much smaller than what everyone else was pulling. When I had to pull, it wasn’t too bad. But, the big hills and things like that, it was often Paul who was pulled in. Big shoutout to him, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to pull it myself.”

Daniel Weyman is “excited” by fan debates about his character

Weyman also weighed in on one of the most common criticisms about his character from the hardcore Tolkien fans. In the author’s works, wizards don’t arrive in Middle-earth until the Third Age. The Stranger seems to contradict that.

Weyman has been fascinated by the fan response. “One of the really great things about being on the show is to hear how many people there are in the world that have ownership of Tolkien’s stories because they have lived with them, taken them to heart, researched them, and delved deep into them,” he said. “I as an actor really have enjoyed doing that myself. Far from feeling like I need to respond or say somebody’s right or somebody’s wrong, I’m much more excited by the idea that people’s own theories are bubbling through and saying, ‘Well this does or doesn’t fit with my view.’ For me, I think that there are all sorts of parts of Tolkien’s writing that have allowed me to feel really comfortable with where JD and Patrick have got. They really respect Tolkien’s work and the way that they’re trying to bring this massive time period of the Second Age to the TV screen is really awesome. I tend to feel like, if people keep watching, they will fall in love if they haven’t already.”

The first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available to stream in its entirety on Prime Video.

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