“When doubtful, Elanor Brandyfoot, all the time observe 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 nearly an identical 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 line with 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 had been one other a kind of issues.”
“His relationship with Nori, actually at first, 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 identification lay in his tattered gown. “I don’t know whether or not folks have seen, however the costume adjustments barely over the course of the season,” Weyman notes.
The Rings of Energy staff went with the concept the material was self-healing, virtually dwelling off The Stranger’s presence. “The truth that they had been surrounding The Stranger meant that they subtly modified and altered themselves,” he shares. “It’s like all of them received pulled in, and so it goes from being a really massive, wild costume to being extra of a fancy dress 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 had been going, solely that discovering the celebrities was extraordinarily essential.
“Whenever you get that second of ‘Observe your nostril,’ that’s a second of virtually 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 a terrific place to go away it.”
