The second season of The Rings of Power airs next week on Prime Video. We'll catch up with a ton of different stories, including the journey of the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) and his harfoot companion Nori (Markella Kavenagh) as they venture across the land of Rhûn, a part of Middle-earth little explored in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books.
"ust in terms of their journey that suddenly they're in this new place where they don't know the rules," Weyman told journalists, including WiC, during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. "And suddenly there are these people chasing them, and they don't know why they're chasing them or where they're from. And then they do something else and something else happens and they can't really join the dots. It doesn't make sense."
At the end of season 1, the Stranger — a mysterious figure who may or may not be Gandalf, the wizard we remember from the original Lord of the Rings — gained the ability to speak, whereas he'd been mute for most of the episodes. It's unclear why he's here, but he has tremendous power, so he and Nori are off on a journey of discovery.
The Stranger still doesn't have his memory, but at least he can talk now. "is knowledge of the past isn't really any better, but he's got this ability to communicate," Weyman said. "He's still learning as he goes. Every moment is a new learning opportunity...He has no knowledge about this heat . He's only been in this lovely, luscious sort of green world of the harfoots, and so it's as brand new to him as it is possibly to you guys, and I think that helps us tell an exciting story all the way through."
One thing we do know about the Stranger's journey is that he'll eventually run into Tom Bombadil, a character from The Lord of the Rings books who doesn't often show up in screen adaptations. Weyman is excited for fans to see it:
"Being inside Tom BombadiI's house. Drop dead Gorgeous. An amazing amount of work. Production values through the roof. Detail, layers and layers and layers and layers. Keep looking. And what he does in there: fabulous.”"
Does Poppy go with the Stranger and Nori to Rhûn?
Weyman was interviewed alongside Megan Richards, who plays the harfoot Poppy Proudfellow. (A harfoot is like an earlier version of a hobbit; The Rings of Power takes place a couple thousand years before The Lord of the Rings, and hobbits as we know them don't exist yet.) In the first season, the human-sized Stranger hung out with the diminutive harfoots, which made for some entertaining visuals. The show convinced us that the actors were of vastly different sizes using special effects and vision trickery. For season 2, the tech team stepped things up a notch.
"So in season 1, we'd had to do quite a lot of work with our scale doubles," Weyman explained. "So when I was working with Megan on camera, if they wanted to get both of us, they had to cheat one of us because we weren't the right size in comparison to each other. So if we were looking at Megan, then we might see a tall shoulder. But the tall shoulder would be Paul in the first season, and he was 8 feet tall. And looking down then we could see Megan. We get an understanding of the Stranger in the harfoot together. And similarly, if the camera was on the stranger, then we might use a small scale double for Megan to look up at the stranger...In season two, they worked out incredible camera things so that we ended up being able to shoot together."
"And there's a load of people behind the scenes, sort of with rulers and measurements putting things into computers, going ‘No, no, no, they need to be 50 centimeters this way.’ But we didn't have any of that. There are famous stories in the film versions of people, sort of being, you know, one person over here looking this way, one person back there looking that way, and it looks like they're talking to each other, but we were able to look into each other's eyes, you know. It was absolutely brilliant."
Apparently the two of them were even able to hug on camera and have it look natural onscreen. "I still don't understand it," Megan Richards mused.
That leads to an interesting question: does Poppy go with the Stranger on his trip into Rhûn? Because at the end of the first season, the Stranger left with Poppy's best friend Nori, but Poppy herself stayed behind with the harfoot caravan.
Both Weyman and Richards make it sound like the trio will be traveling together. "To put all three of those characters in that position is really new territory," Weyman says at one point.
Richards kind of sounds like she's contemplating a group as well: "hey constantly get thrown questions," she said. "You know, they set out to get the answer to the one question, which is ‘who is the stranger.’ But actually, instead of getting the answer to that question, they just keep getting thrown more and more questions without the answers so it's completely discombobulating." And later she talks about the power of makeup and costume to get her into character: "And being with you and Markella whilst doing that…there's something special about that. Like, the Poppy that I portray would not be the Poppy without your stranger and without Markella’s Nori."
There's nothing definitive here, but I wonder if Poppy will eventually catch up with her friends. We'll find out when The Rings of Power season 2 premieres on Prime Video on Thursday, August 29.
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