The third season of The Wheel of Time wrapped up about a month ago, and we're still impressed, particularly with the fourth episode, "The Road to the Spear." This episode followed Rand al'Thor (Josha Stradowski) and Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) as they ventured into the sacred city of Ruidean, where they saw many strange things. Rand took a trip into the distant past, seeing events through the eyes of several of his ancestors. In all, Josha Stradowski played seven different characters in that episode; the youngest was a teenager and the oldest was in his eighties. At least from where I was sitting, I believed every one of them. I didn't even realize it was Stradowski playing all of them until it was pointed out to me afterwards!
Stradowski deserves a ton of credit for these amazing transformation, but we also have to acknowledge Davina Lamont, the head of the makeup, hair and prosthetics departments for The Wheel of Time. Speaking to Gold Derby, Lamont revealed that she did 500 fittings for more than 300 characters in season 3. And although we saw Stradowski play six additional characters, Lamont created seven new looks; one didn't end up getting used.
"He had to have red hair going through each one of them," Lamont remembered. "He had to have different versions of his ancestors, and whether it be the long hair, all the beard work. And we had lots of different prosthetic pieces. We had lots of different eye colors. We tried teeth as well. So I started the process of doing hyper-realistic concepts and to get those approved. And then we started the process of going, 'OK, so making all the wigs that we could to kind of differentiate between the seven at that stage."
"The biggest feat was him in his full prosthetic with neck with full costume, as well as to make him look a heavier set. ... It was unbelievable what we put him through for an entire day. With Josha, he had never really been in...this amount of prosthetics before, and knowing that he'd have to sit still for three-and-a-half to up to five-and-a-half hours was also massive for him to take on and to wear the wigs and to have all the beard work and stuff like that along with the costume. He did an amazing job. And we started off in the testing phase where he said, 'Once I put him into the full look and we put him into costume,' he just went away for a couple of hours and just really just sat with the character just to kind of get himself ready for this."
And this was all just to sample the looks; Stradowski would have to get into the costumes again later for filming. If I wasn't already impressed with his work as Rand (and as Rand's ancestors), then I certainly am now.
And Rand's journey was only half the episode! Elsewhere, Moiraine faced her own trial in Rhuidean; she saw thousands of visions of possible futures, and the show went above and beyond to show us several of them. Working with her team in coordination with costume designer Sharon Gilham, Lamont created fully 12 different looks for Moiraine, most of which we don't see for more than a second or two as various futures flash before Moiraine's eyes. That's dedication!
Really, this whole episode was a monument to how far The Wheel of Time cast and crew would go to make the fans happy, adapting a key section from Robert Jordan's book The Shadow Rising with as much detail and love as possible.
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