First look images from Amazon’s The Wheel of Time show reveal the cast of the sprawling fantasy epic. After Game of Thrones was a sensation for HBO, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously began searching for his own fantasy-based literary property to adapt in hopes of making the same magic.
Bezos and Amazon ultimately decided to make not one but two series based on major fantasy literary properties. Lord of the Rings is of course the more well-publicized, as is to be expected for a TV show based on Tolkien’s three-book masterpiece. But Amazon is also set to deliver The Wheel of Time, an adaptation of Robert Jordan’s 15-volume series published from 1990 to 2013. Season 1 of Wheel of Time has in fact already finished filming with work on season 2 now underway. Showrunner Rafe Judkins recently said that 8 seasons of the show have already been loosely planned.
But before any of Amazon’s big Wheel of Time plans can play out, the show first has to premiere. Ahead of its arrival in a few months time, EW has revealed a handful of first look images showing much of the cast including Rosamund Pike as Moiraine. See the epic pictures in the space below:
Pike’s Moiraine is there in the top image leading a group of survivors from the monster-beset village of Two Rivers. The next image features the characters of Egwene al'Vere (Madeleine Madden) and Rand al'Thor (Josha Stradowski), two young people from Two Rivers who have known each other all their lives. The third image focuses on the character of Logain (Álvaro Morte), a man with magical powers who thinks he’s a king. Lastly is an intriguing shot of Moiraine being carried by Lan (Daniel Henney) through the abandoned city of Shadar Logoth, a place of dark energy where even the story’s monsters the Trollocs are afraid to go.
Indeed magic figures heavily in The Wheel of Time as Moiraine is a member of an all-female order of magicians called the Aes Sedai. Over the course of the story, Moiraine begins to suspect that a member of her group may be the reincarnation of the Dragon, a messianic figure destined to either save the world or destroy it. These all sound like classic fantasy elements for sure and the images above definitely give off a vibe that will be familiar to anyone who watched a single episode of Game of Thrones. But how will The Wheel of Time distinguish itself from the biggest fantasy series in TV history or indeed from Amazon’s other major fantasy show Lord of the Rings?
It will be interesting to see if The Wheel of Time is able to escape the shadows of the shows and movies that came before it. Of course much will come down to the cast of characters and the twists and turns taken by the plot. The Wheel of Time does have one advantage over Game of Thrones in that it has many more books to pull from and shouldn’t have that GoT problem of going beyond the source material and winding up adrift. The Wheel of Time begins to turn on Amazon in November 2021.
Source: EW