The Wheel of Time star issued legal complaints to quash misinformation about why he left

The first season of The Wheel of Time aired on Amazon in 2021. While fans were happy to see Robert Jordan’s vaunted book series finally get a proper adaptation, the show was unlucky in that it had to film chunks of its season at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when no one knew how long this was going to last, or exactly what precautions to take, and everything just kind of shut down for a while. Remember that? Remember how fun that was? Ugh.

At one point, The Wheel of Time filming stopped and only resumed once certain social distancing measured were in place. You can kind of tell that it affected the final two episodes of the season in particular; sequences like the battle at Fal Dara don’t quite have the scale you’d expect.

Also, one of the lead actors didn’t return to work along with the rest of the cast after the break: Barney Harris, who played Mat Cauthon, didn’t come back and basically had to be written out of the show for the final two episodes. In the book, he goes with the rest of the gang through the Ways to Fal Dara. On the show, he stays behind at Tar Valon.

Barney Harris will not return as Mat Cauthon in The Wheel of Time season 2

In the second season of The Wheel of Time, Mat will be played by Dónal Finn. So the show is moving on without Harris. But what happened with him?

Well, the short answer is we don’t know, although plenty of rumors popped up at the time. One of them was that Harris didn’t return to work because he refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19, a rumor that was suspect on its face because The Wheel of Time resumed shooting before a vaccine was even available for emergency use authorization. None of the cast members were vaccinated when filming on season 1 resumed in September of 2020; it wasn’t possible to be vaccinated then.

Nonetheless, rumors spread on certain sites online. Now, the Redditor u/Alternative-City-138 has found a record of a legal complaint that Harris issued to Google asking that pages reporting the false rumor as fact be removed from Google search results. The complaint was filed in November of 2022. Several articles on the topic were indeed later removed or changed.

So we know that Harris not returning to work on The Wheel of Time had nothing to do with a refusal to take a nonexistent vaccine. But what was the reason? According to the complaint, “It has been a very difficult time for me and my family for highly personal reasons,” which is probably as close as we’ll ever get to an answer.

And I think that’s where we can leave it. Whatever “highly personal reasons” Harris had for leaving the show, they’re for him to know. You can soon see Harris in the horror film Magpie. As for The Wheel of Time, it returns for its second season on Amazon Prime Video on September 1.

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