The Wheel of Time season 3 gets “very ambitious,” with lots of new characters

The second season of The Wheel of Time ended this past Friday with “What Was Meant To Be,” which was a terrific way to go out. Next up: it’s full speed ahead towards season 3.

Well…not quite full speed. Although season 3 was already filming before Hollywood actors went on strike in July, the strike has slowed things down. Still, before that happened, the cast was excited to bring us more Wheel of Time. “We are in the midst of it,” star Rosamund Pike (Moiraine) told TheWrap a couple weeks before the strike. “We are all energized by everything that’s going on in Season 3. We feel like we’ve established the rules of our world, we can explore them and push the boundaries, we can do more experimental camera work and we can try and get a visual language for these incredible concepts that [author] Robert Jordan came up with.”

Pike also said that casting on season 3 had been shaping up “really, really, really well.” Expect a lot more characters in season 3. “Actors are really flocking to come and be guest stars on our show,” she said. “They know that we have a show with diversity at its core, where people are embraced to celebrate powerful figures in all their dimensions and we’ve got fantastic actresses of all ages coming to do amazing work on our show, and actors too. It is very exciting that people now know that this is a home that they can have for a few months, that they can come and do exciting work and play really unforgettable characters, and you’ll get a glimpse of some of them in Season 2 and way more in Season 3.”

Daniel Henney, who plays Moiraine’s warder Lan, also teased an expansion of the cast, saying there are “so many new cast members.” The Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan certainly have enough characters to go around, and we have heard of actors like The Expanse’s Shohreh Aghdashloo coming on to play important ones. What other surprises does season 3 hold for us?

“Actors are really flocking to…be guest stars” on The Wheel of Time

“[T]hey’re shooting and we’re being very ambitious this season, with some big traveling plans toward the end of this year for my character specifically, and Moiraine (Pike),” Henney continued. “So it’s going to be in the same vein. We want it to flow, be darker, same pacing. It’s going to be great.”

Moiraine and Lan went through the ringer in season 2, with Moiraine losing access to the One Power and severing her magical bond with her warder. Although they re-forged the bond at the end of the season, it was very rough going in the middle, so rough that Pike was a little nervous to play the material, telling Inverse that playing a powerless Moiraine was “not what I signed up for.”

“One of the things that attracted me to the show was developing the [physical] language of channeling, and interpreting how you channel the elements of the universe,” Pike said. “So the idea of Moiraine being cut off from that was problematic for me.”

Rosamund Pike found Moiraine’s storyline in The Wheel of Time season 2 “problematic”

Henney, on the other hand, enjoyed the opportunity to play the tense scenes between Lan and Moiraine. “It was really fun, to be honest with you, to try different things,” he said. “There were things we tried that were so left field that they couldn’t keep, [but] that’s the beauty of a show like this… It’s scary; you don’t know if the characters should go there. But you’ve got to trust the team around you, the writers — and I think it turned out alright.”

"This season is interesting. You have a chance to see [Lan] interact with men his age, have conversations with fellow warders about existential things, questioning life — which he would never do before."

Like we said, Moiraine and Lan re-upped their bond at the end of season 2, after Moiraine was able to reconnect with the One Power, so these sorts of tense scenes are likely behind them. But don’t worry: they’ll have plenty of other challenges to overcome.

We don’t know when the third season of The Wheel of Time will premiere on Amazon Prime Video, except that it’s probably later than Amazon originally intended. It will depend on how long the actors strikes goes on for; negotiations are happening now and everyone is hoping for a swift resolution. With any luck, Amazon could still get the season out to us by late 2024.

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