Daniel Weyman won’t spoil if the Stranger is Gandalf, Saruman, or a new Middle-earth Istar, but he clarifies the beard, the hat, and the powers in a new post-finale interview.
Daniel Weyman either has the easiest or toughest job on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Since falling out of the sky like a meteor, Weyman’s the Stranger has spent most of season 1 learning the lay of the land and upending life for Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and her insulated harfoot community, leaving him with only a few lines of dialogue and the occasional mystical magic moment.
But Weyman’s time on The Rings of Power press tour has been nearly as rigorous — as in, everything he could possibly say would be a spoiler. Is his character Gandalf? Sauron? Saruman? Radagast? Tom Bombadil? Other? The prying has been endless, but when your character is a walking mystery box, that’s part of what you sign up for. The Rings of Power season 1 finale answered a few questions — we know the Stranger isn’t Sauron, but is an Istar (or wizard), like Gandalf.
How did Weyman, whose previous work ranges from HBO’s Gentleman Jack to the Sandman audio drama, approach the ambiguity? And what’s in store for season 2? Polygon spoke to the actor, who was in London where the next season of The Rings of Power is currently being filmed, to ask everything we could possibly imagine him answering about the Middle-earth’s biggest unknown.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity, and contains spoilers for all of The Rings of Power season 1.]
Polygon: The Stranger isn’t just a mysterious character; he’s pretty much a walking mystery box. How much did the creative team want you to know about him, and how much did you want to know?
Daniel Weyman: Pretty early on the showrunners made it clear that they we were really interested in following his story in the present. So they weren’t massively interested in overreach of where this character is going to go or anything that we had to tie in there. I think they allowed wonderful resonances to appear in lots of different scenes and episodes, not just for my character, but for others as well, that fans can go back and look at the source material and make up their own minds. Lots of them are very different. Up until this one comes out, I think there was a healthy amount who thought the Stranger might be very dark.
So it feels like it’s ongoing, and it’s actually been quite joyous to film because anytime I’ve come to a scene, starting in the crater, I haven’t had to think about anything past what’s in front of me in the script. He knows nothing when he wakes up. All I had to concentrate on was what that feeling might be like in his body, coming around in a crater with smoke, with fire, with rock, looking like an awful warzone, and then this very strange being in front of him, who I think at the beginning he can’t even separate from nature itself.
