The Rings of Power‘s first season brought an Istar to Middle-earth. We just didn’t know for certain the Stranger was a wizard until the season finale. What’s it been like for star Daniel Weyman since that revelation? That was just one of the many questions we asked him ahead of the show’s second year on Prime Video. We also wanted to know about being part of a wizard/Hobbit partnership. What it’s like for his character now that he knows what he is (sort of). And whether or not we’ll find out his true identity this year.
Nerdist: We spoke just a couple of days after season one’s finale when the world learned for certain the Stranger was a wizard. I’m curious, in almost two years since that revelation, how do people treat you knowing you’re a member of that very important Middle-earth group?
Daniel Weyman: I would love to say they gave me a lot of respect, but pretty much the same as always. Mainly the people I speak to have found the story of the Stranger has resonated for them because of the way that they are present for these big learning moments. As he understands friendship, as he begins to trust, as he sees in the Harfoot community love, and their sort of communal humanity. And then in the way he has his own personal journey with understanding his own power. Danger versus good, there to help or to do selfish deeds, that sort of thing is resonating a lot with people.
When I come back to it, that idea of the seduction around power, the fact that when we, in the real world are at our most powerful, or when we can be powerful, they can also be our most seduced moments. We’re seduced into thinking we should use that power. Or that, in fact, if I throw my weight around, that in fact makes me a better person or a stronger person and that’s what I want to identify with. So there’s been a bit of that around the journey. And I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about the tender side of the Stranger.
Certainly early Stranger season one, even before he could speak, people were getting quite a lot of tenderness through his listening, which was interesting. That wasn’t something I had thought about. I’d sort of been aware of the light moments and the dark moments. The light was normally the wonder and the lack of knowledge, and the dark was more of this possibility of being seduced by the more evil side, the dark side.
They were the things that have really come through. But it’s been really fun listening to people and listening to people talk about how the first season affected them or the characters that they loved. And people have been pretty complimentary to my face about the Stranger.
You spent season one with the Stranger not knowing who or what he is. What was it like playing him this time when he knows he’s a wizard? What was better and what was more challenging?
Weyman: That’s a really good question. I think when we left him at the end of season one, he was off with Nori beginning this journey. And I really felt he was at this point of being most hopeful, most positive, most free from being weighed down by external things or not knowing stuff. So this idea, this vision, of them stomping off through the greenery felt like a very light moment in his journey. And obviously as we get into season two, that quickly turns into a sort of arid path rather than a lush green path. The heat starts to bake down and before we know it. They don’t have a whole heap of food or drink and they’re possibly being followed and the Stranger’s being troubled by these dreams.
That’s where the crux of your question comes in. Yeah he is pretty certain that he’s a wizard. Other people have heard. Nori’s heard. The mystics call him an Istar. And he’s got some relationship with that. Some knowledge, I think through helping with the mystics and maybe using the stuff that Nori gave him to channel. The energy has, in some way, just reconnected him to a bit more of his origins and his eternal being.
But how he uses that or what that means for his understanding of Middle-earth, I think is murkier. I got the impression just watching that end of (episode) eight and now knowing where I’ve been in season two, that he thought his next part of the journey was going to be plain sailing. And the darkness that he’d experienced in season one was largely internal darkness about his own decisions, about how much he wanted to exert his control, how wonderful it was to be able to choose whether a firefly dies or lives. The power of being able to regenerate an apple tree, those sort of things. They were sort of internal struggles.
Whereas now I feel when he’s on his journey, he’s much more aware of this landscape struggle. He’s much more aware of Middle-earth being in peril itself. I get the feeling he senses darkness rising. The moment when he managed to produce these beetles from the broken tree, when they’re looking for food, I feel even in that moment he senses that they’re almost like the blood in his veins. That he’s worried about this Middle-earth malaise, this rising of darkness, is in some way a question that’s going to confront him. That in some way his purpose is going to be inextricably linked to this darkness rising.
But I don’t think he knows in what way, because I think in these dreams he’s being troubled by, they seem to be suggesting that as he makes choices, bad things happen. And I think he still isn’t far enough away from season one Stranger to have shed that idea that there is some fate or destiny of which it doesn’t matter how hard he might try, he’s still going to end up causing problems or causing darkness. So that’s sort of where we meet him.
Wizard-Hobbit relationship is at the very core of The Lord of the Rings. Does the partnership between Gandalf and Bilbo and Frodo influence your performance and interactions with Nori and Poppy in any way?
Weyman: It’s funny, you’re the second person to ask me that really specific question. And it seems weird to say this, but I hadn’t thought about those relationships in comparison with our relationships. Which I get must be a bit strange. It must sound naive or just dumb.
Not at all, actually. I ask because I’m fascinated by the process of creating characters.
Weyman: For me, it all goes back to the first time I met Markella and we did some rehearsals together. The showrunners were in the room, and J. A. (Bayona), who was directing the first episode. The Stranger obviously wasn’t going to talk, and we did this sort of little rehearsal around the crater scene when she prods the Stranger and the Stranger wakes up. Just that moment, I think J.A. wanted to get a sense of how that might look, or what the energies might be so he could think about how he was going to film it. And Markella and I sort of leapt into that.
We were in this disused school drama center, and they built blocks for the crater out of those wooden sort of things that kids used to use for stages at school. So they built this sort of crater and I was in it in my rehearsal clothes. Markella came up and did her bit. And as the Stranger woke up, I had a fairly violent, as in terrified, response and it was quite big. She obviously was terrified being Nori. I sort of skidded off the crater and ended up on the floor a bit and he was all a bit mayhem.
After that, there was something that happened between Markella and me. There’s this expression, “Strong but wrong.” So strong but wrong is something that I’m very capable of doing. Big idea…utterly, utterly wrong. But in that room, we both felt comfortable enough to go bold and see what they thought. Now as it happened, J.A. did think it was largely a wrong direction. He said to me very quickly, “You did quite a lot of this and I’d really like it if you didn’t do any of that, I’d like to see what happens.” But the point was that, we’d both been, on this show first thing in front of the showrunners together, and we hadn’t met each other before. We sort of bonded by our joint risk.
I feel like the Stranger’s relationship to Nori almost came secondarily from my relationship with Markella. So this blurring of Markella and I’s bond, through being able to express story without dialogue from the Stranger. Or through physical action. We had a movement coordinator, Lara, who is brilliant. We worked as three together to explore some of the ideas around what that might mean for those two beings.
The further we got into the Stranger-Nori relationship, it sort of felt like it took over from the Daniel-Markella relationship in a way that meant I, strangely, never conceived of the Wizard-Hobbit relationship. And also, the other thing to say about that is that the showrunners didn’t write it (that way). We didn’t know I was a wizard when we started. The wizard bit crystallized very late for me and Markella. The storiy that came still had this possibility he was a dark character. Yes, we knew that he’d survived this fireball. So we knew he wasn’t human or any being that was mortal on Middle-earth. But there were other question marks around where his power led and what kind of character he was.
So really the wizardry part came so late on that by then the relationship had formed. And yet, in all honesty, I hadn’t thought about that bond in that context.
I know you can’t tell me if you are, in fact, Mithrandir. But I am curious if you personally, at this point, know whether or not you are secretly Gandalf.
Weyman: You are curious whether I know as an actor, you mean?
As an actor, yes.
Weyman: That’s an interesting question…
How about this? Do you know your real identity, which is something that is teased early in the season?
Weyman: Yeah, that’s really an interesting. Because my argument has always been with this—and I think this is how the showrunners have tried to handle me—is that I would argue that I’ve always known. I’ve always known who he was because I’ve been with him since he was born. He was nothing else. He’s nothing else, because he hasn’t been through anything else yet. And the joy is here that the audience also knows exactly who he is. You’ve all been through exactly what I’ve been through, and that’s all there is at the minute of the Stranger.
So we do know who he is. We know very well who he is by having been with him. Interestingly, we know more about being with him than we do of any other character in the whole piece. They’ve all got a history that we don’t know anything about.
Now I know certain things have started to crystallize for (the Stranger) about this possibility of another world. And I think that’ll be fun for when Tom Bombadil comes in and we know they cross paths. Suddenly, then, you get another eternal character, Tom Bombadil, who has a dimensional quality that the Stranger hasn’t really come across yet, except for a bit with the mystics maybe.
When he comes into the sphere of Tom Bombadil, what does that do for the Stranger’s relationship to the Harfoots, which is dimensionally like our relationship in the real world. But then imagine we are in the presence of a God or a demigod, how much that would shrink down the idea of three dimensional landscape. Because four dimensional landscape gives us so much. Where does that place Nori/Poppy/the Strangers relationship? How does that fit in with what Tom Bombadil exists in? And challenges the Stranger about whether they’re positive things or negative things? I dunno whether that answers your question at all.
It gets to the last topic, because I want to talk about that interaction with Tom Bombadi. I just want to ask you personally, when you’re standing in this immersive set and you’re standing opposite Tom Bombadil in his hat, do you take a moment to just kind of nerd out about the whole thing?
Weyman: Ab-so-lutely. Ab-so-lutely. There was a lot of nerding out. And the set was just sumptuous. For me it couldn’t have been better. The place they made him have his home in this area when he’s in this moment, it was an unbelievably beautiful thing. And Tom, in classic Tom fashion, was able to be full of the whimsy that he is. The light touch, the speed of thought, the challenging, confronting behavior, and also the moments of utter earth shockingly massive revelation and grounded, rooted sensibility that he has.
Of course, the Stranger doesn’t know necessarily everything that we know about Tom Bombadil. He’s kept playing catch up anyway. But there’s a lot of being in the presence of Tom Bombadil for the Stranger, only suddenly becoming aware of this fourth dimension, this eternal creature, there’s a lot of catch up. It was all pretty new when he started working with a three-dimensional character in Nori, in the Harfoots, learning about all those things: friendship, love, honesty, community, place, distance. But now he’s got to catch up to a whole new being. He’s got this other sphere of, “Oh my gosh, it goes down there and it goes down there. It’s everywhere.” So t was really fun to be on stage. Really fun.