The season finale for The Wheel of Time has arrived, bringing its stellar third season to an epic conclusion. "He Who Comes With The Dawn" featured a number of crucial scenes for most every member of the show's sprawling cast, including one fans of the book series have been champing at the bit to see for years. During the finale, Mat Cauthon (Dónal Finn) goes to the Panarch's Palace to search for a dangerous collar ter'angreal which the Black Ajah means to use to enslave the Dragon Reborn. But instead of finding it, he stumbles through a redstone doorframe and finds himself in another dimension. There, Mat encounters an Eelfinn — an otherworldly being who grants dangerous wishes with unforeseen consequences.
The Eelfinn scene is one of the most memorable in Robert Jordan's book The Shadow Rising, and while it happens in a different location in the show, it's still something fans rejoiced to finally see onscreen. It helped that the Eelfinn itself is a towering figure who exudes menace and mystery. But beneath that suit of heavy prosthetics is an actor, Robert Strange. We had the opportunity to speak with him about filming this important scene.
Strange told us all about his preparations for the role and what it was like getting into costume, behind-the-scenes secrets from filming with Dónal Finn, and how playing this part differed from his work on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, where he played a number of different characters including Glüg the orc. Watch our full interview below, or read on for a transcription edited for clarity.
How Robert Strange found out he was playing the Eelfinn
Just like Callum Kerr (Galad) and Luke Fetherston (Gawyn), Robert Strange had no idea what character or even show he was auditioning for when he first began corresponding with The Wheel of Time team. But it wasn't long before he figured it out. "I got an audition tape that came through for something that I could tell was a code name, which is quite common," he said. "[T]he names of things often get changed. But at that point I'd watched season 1 and I think season 2, and I just had my suspicions. I also knew that I'd been recommended for something by Nick Dudman, who was head of prosthetics, and then this came in and I managed to put the pieces together."
"But that said, the actual audition was also...all the words were changed, all the names were changed. so I had no idea really that it was an Eelfinn," Strange said. "I just knew it was some kind of fantastical, extra dimensional being with poise and power. So I sent the tape off and then I found out I got the role, and then the details started to come in thick and fast, and that's where the real work began."
The "real work" in this case was a large range of things, from extensive research to working with a dialect coach and, of course, figuring out how to act in the distinctive prosthetic suit of the Eelfinn, which was entirely practical.
"I could talk about it for a whole hour...before even the costume and the makeup and anything, I wanted to do as much research as possible, because I was aware how much this means to so many people," Strange said. "[A]ctually, looking back, I don't think I really had a clue how much it means to so many people. Now I'm starting to really get that sense, but you know, I know how huge this world is and how many fans there are, so I wanted to absorb as much of it as I could."
In order to absorb all that information, Strange turned to the same resource any fan would: the books. "I tried to read all the books in time," he recalled. "It wasn't enough to read 14 books, so I read as much as as I could, but I did have to jump ahead to the Eelfinn moment. So I absorbed all the lore, all the information."
"What I think is so brilliant about Robert Jordan's world is that he gives you these worlds that feel fully realized, they feel fully imagined with so much detail, but at the same time there was nothing at all...you end up with more questions than you started with about, like, what actually are these things and what are they doing? So I tried to absorb it all, I tried to answer as many questions as I had, and then there's a certain point where you just have to kind of let it go."
Strange's research didn't end at just The Wheel of Time. He also relied on some real-world references for the fox-like Eelfinn. "I did some research on foxes, I wanted to have a sense of fox movement and just the energy of foxes," he said. "But then actually, a lot of that I had to adapt because the costume I was in, it was defining in terms of the actual physicality, which I loved because so often...in all the creatures I play, I'm often...a soldier or in the mud or in the dirt, or not wearing anything at all, to be honest. So it was so fun to wear this like incredibly intricate, detailed, beautiful leather work, and the skirt and the boots. So that really defined the movement and the poise and the posture."
Getting into the Eelfinn suit was no small task. Strange says it took around seven hours to apply all the prosthetics, and around two hours to take it all off again at the end of filming, "because all the fur was directly stuck to my skin."
The Eelfinn scene was recorded in both Old Tongue and English
Strange's prep work didn't end with figuring out how to move in the suit. He also had to perfect the unique tone and speech patterns of the Eelfinn. "I also did a lot of work with Naomi [Joy Todd], who was the dialect coach," Strange said. "I wanted to bring in as much Old Tongue as I could because these beings are older than the Wheel potentially, so I wanted to bring in as much of that sense as possible."
"I actually asked them to translate almost all the dialogue, and then on the day we recorded it in both so that they could choose...which lines they wanted to keep in Old Tongue and which in English," he recalled. "[S]he helped me with the accent as well, so that it felt like a new accent for the show as well. So it was all a huge collaborative process, which is the way it always is with any acting, but with the creature work especially, which is the part of the job I love the most."
What's the difference between an Eelfinn and an orc?
Strange has done quite a bit of creature work over the years, but perhaps his most extensive was in another Amazon production, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Strange played nine different characters in The Rings of Power, each with vastly different movement styles and looks. How was his experience working on The Wheel of Time different from that other fantasy series?
"[I]t's the beauty of prosthetics, you can just put on a new face," he said. "But my main one was Glüg in season 2, who was our poor 'orc with an arc.' And in some ways, Glüg and the Eelfinn couldn't really be more different. But...I suppose I approach it in the same way, which is the same way I'd approach a lot of things, which is even though it's fantastical and you've got to come up with a thing that doesn't exist, I still want to approach it from the same way I would approach like a play or a Shakespeare character or something, which is like, what do they want? How do they exist? What are they doing in the moment? What are they trying to get to?"
"I suppose an extra challenge with the Eelfinn was, you know if you're playing a vampire...or you're playing something that is not of our world...the Eelfinn are already not of the world, of the world that we're in," Strange added. "So there was this extra layer that we wanted to create, that we really wanted to kind of come across...that they just don't belong in any of what we've seen so far in The Wheel of Time, but they also have this familiarity with the fox den smell. They have this real threat to them, but they're also quite seductive and intriguing. It was a lot of fun to play with, to be honest, because I mean the possibilities are limitless, really."
A huge thank you to Robert Strange for stopping by the site to take us through the redstone doorframe into the world of the Eelfinn!
All eight episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 are now streaming on Prime Video. As we await a fourth season renewal for the series, we're still picking through all the many twists and turns from the season finale:
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