“When unsure, Elanor Brandyfoot, all the time comply with your nostril,” The Stranger tells the younger Harfoot in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Energy’s Season 1 finale.
The road is sort of similar to what Gandalf (performed by Ian McKellen) tells Pippin in Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, leaving many questioning if The Stranger — who was revealed to be an Istari — is the famed Gray Wizard. Including to hypothesis is his friendship with Nori and the opposite Harfoots, which feels harking back to Gandalf’s relationships with each Bilbo Baggins and Bilbo’s nephew Frodo.
However does Daniel Weyman, who performs the Stranger, additionally see the parallels? In response to the actor, The Stranger had a “extra visceral relationship” with the land and water and fireplace, and Nori was “interacting with him as if she have been one other a type of issues.”
“His relationship with Nori, definitely to start with, is as if she is an vitality of this world that he comes into,” he explains. “I didn’t actually take into consideration these overtones of the later work or all of that, but it surely’s pretty if folks get resonances.”
The reveal that The Stranger is an Istari got here as a shock to some — together with the wizard himself — however a key clue to his id lay in his tattered gown. “I don’t know whether or not folks have observed, however the costume adjustments barely over the course of the season,” Weyman notes.
The Rings of Energy group went with the concept the fabric was self-healing, virtually residing off The Stranger’s presence. “The truth that they have been surrounding The Stranger meant that they subtly modified and altered themselves,” he shares. “It’s like all of them acquired pulled in, and so it goes from being a really huge, wild costume to being extra of a dressing up of an Istari.”
Season 1 ended with The Stranger and his Harfoot companion staring down a brand new journey. They didn’t know precisely the place they have been going, solely that discovering the celebs was extraordinarily necessary.
“Whenever you get that second of ‘Observe your nostril,’ that’s a second of just about placing their arms round one another simply going, ‘That is our journey. That is us going off and doing this collectively,’” Weyman says. “It’s an ideal place to depart it.”
