DRAGONMOUNT

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai   The Official The Wheel of Time social media accounts had a fun #WOTWednesday activity for fans. They dropped puzzle pieces into random folks DMs all over twitter and Instagram. They also posted some pieces to Facebook. It was the community’s job to put the puzzle together, which revealed a new poster! Folks were sent this quote and one piece of the puzzle.   Twitter user Ben Mulder streamed his puzzle building on the Wot Series discord server, which had as many at 50 people watching and sharing puzzle pieces.  The poster features Moiraine and Lan standing in Emonds Field and Moiraine appears to be holding a dead trolloc by the scruff of neck. 

Amazon revealed today, as part of their New York Comic Con panel, a video clip from the premiere episode of their upcoming Wheel of Time TV show. Showrunner Rafe Judkins introduced the scene as an iconic moment when Moiraine Sedai (played by Rosamund Pike) first appears in the Winespring Inn.     Visit our TV show section of the website for more info including a full Season 1 cast list.    What did you think of the clip? Who's ready for November 19, 2021?  

Amazon Prime announced today that Ceara Coveney, Natasha O'Keeffe, and Meera Syal will join the cast for season 2 of the upcoming Wheel of Time TV show.  These actresses join Dónal Finn as the first people announced for season 2.    Newcomer Ceara Coveney will play the iconic role of Elayne Trakand, the Daughter-Heir on Andor, and novice Aes Sedai.      Ceara's official bio states:     Natasha O'Keeffe is confirmed to be playing an unspecified role in season 2. According to show runner Rafe Judkins, she will play "one of the most important characters" in the series. At this point your guess is as good as ours as to who she will play!     Natasha's bio:   Meera Syal is also confirmed to play an unspecified role in season 2. Like Nataha O'Keeffe, Rafe Judkins describes her role as one of the most important in the series.      Meera's bio:   Who you you think Natasha O'Keeffe and Meera Syal will play?  Are you excited for Ceara Coveney to play Elayne? Let us know in the comments!    

Composer Lorne Balfe and Amazon Prime released the first single from The Wheel of Time soundtrack today.   The track is called "Al'Naito" which, in the Old Tongue dictionary from the books translates roughly as "For the Flame."  The music can be heard in full here:     It can also be found on Apple Music here.    Notably, the track includes lyrics from the Old Tongue, which shows an amazing level of artistry and research into the lore from the beeok series.    The Wheel of Time TV show premieres on Amazon Prime on November 19, 2021. For more information about the show, visit our TV section of thr website.

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai       There’s a new poster for the Wheel of Time TV show on Amazon Prime. The poster was released today after a small twitter contest. Fifty people won digital signed & personalized copies of the poster.       The new poster follows up on the previous poster which had Moiraine alone, stepping through a waygate.   The new poster features our first close look at shadowspawn including a myddraal and trollocs. It also features the magnificent seven, including Zoë Robins as Nynaeve, Barney Harris as Mat, Daniel Henney as Lan, Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, Madeleine Madden as Egwene, Marcus Rutherford as Perrin, and Josha Stradowski as Rand.     We also got a glimpse of another version of the poster in The Wheel of Time’s twitter banner, and from the Prime Video NL, which is the prime social media account in the Netherlands.    

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai     Amazon Prime Video posted three new photos from the Wheel of Time TV show.   The first is of Moiraine, looking quite calm and serenely smiling at something out of the frame.       The second is of Lan, holding a sword with old tongue script.       Eagle-eyed fans figured out that the script uses the known old tongue alphabet.  It’s a quote from The Great Hunt when Moiraine meets Lord Agelmar and says “Your welcome warms me, Lord Agelmar.” It’s nice Easter egg for fans that they used the actual old tongue, although the actual translation leaves us a bit confused.   And finally, the best (in my opinion) for last. Rand and Egwene plus their horses, which must include Bela!!! They make such a cute couple, embracing and smiling at each other. I want to really believe their relationship in the show.     Finally, a little update on the New York Comic Con. It's this Friday Oct 8th at 2:30 pm Eastern. You can watch the livestream here. If you can't watch it live, you would need to buy a digital ticket and watch the panel up to 30 days after. Check out the incredible line up we can expect!     

Adam Whitehead is Dragonmount's TV blogger. Adam has been writing about film and television, The Wheel of Time, and other genre fiction for over fifteen years, and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2020. Be sure to check out his websites, The Wertzone and Atlas of Ice and Fire (including The Wheel of Time Atlas!) as well as his Patreon.   News has broken that Barney Harris, who was cast as Mat Cauthon in The Wheel of Time, has been replaced for the show’s second season before the first even airs. The news took fans and commentators by surprise, since recasting a major role in a franchise is somewhat unusual, and worried others about what this means for the series. Amazon have, so far, not commented on the replacement other than acknowledging that it has taken place and Irish actor Dónal Finn will be playing the role from the second season onwards.   The move is not entirely unprecedented, though with other shows not based on novels the writers have more flexibility in how to proceed. When Michael O’Hare withdrew from his lead role as Commander Sinclair in classic 1990s space opera Babylon 5, the writers replaced him with another character, John Sheridan, played Bruce Boxleitner and worked the change for the benefit of the story (Sinclair’s departure became a major plot point in the third season) and the show’s marketing (Boxleitner being a much better-known actor who brought his own fanbase onboard).   Often replacing a lead actor happens early enough that they can reshoot all the material already completed by the original actor and the audience is none the wiser: French film actress Genevieve Bujold was cast as Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, but after two days realised she couldn’t handle the rigours of American network television and stepped down. Second choice Kate Mulgrew was available to take over immediately and general audiences didn't even know a swap had taken place.     Slightly more problematic was the unaired pilot episode of Game of Thrones. Two major roles, Catelyn Stark and Daenerys Targaryen, was originally played by different actors: Jennifer Ehle and Tamzin Merchant. Both actresses gave good performances, but both had other things going on that made them reluctant to come back for the series proper: Ehle had recently become a mother and her family was based in New York. After realising the time commitment to the series for at least three years, she decided to back out. Merchant had not been excited by the script and was uncomfortable with the nude scenes in the pilot, but had been talked into doing the role because working for HBO could be good for her career. Her reluctance in the role came through in her performance and the producers agreed to let her go and recast. In both cases the replacement actors – Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke – became critically acclaimed in their roles and Ehle and Merchant have both gone on to success in other projects. Since HBO was deeply unhappy with the pilot and most of it had to be reshot anyway, it all worked out and casual fans were again none the wiser.   Recasting after a whole season is complete is less common, since simply replacing the character with a similar one is usually an easier option. Sometimes, however, the stature and importance of the character makes recasting the only option: Darrin on Bewitched, Aunt Viv on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Becky on Roseanne all come to mind, where replacing key family members of the main character was not really viable and killing them felt a bit off-note for a sitcom.   Where the story is based on source material and the character is set up to play a major role further down the line, recasting becomes unavoidable. Game of Thrones became almost the king of recasting in this fashion. The Mountain was the most egregious example: Conan Stevens played the role on the first season, but bailed after being cast as an orc in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, which he felt would be better for his career (in the event, he was replaced by CGI in the films, so this also didn’t work out). He was replaced at short notice by the show's resident “tall guy” Ian Whyte in the second season and then by Icelandic actor Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson from the third season onwards.   More noticeable, and important for the story, was the role of Daario Naharis. He was played by British actor Ed Skrein in the third season and then Dutch actor Michiel Huisman (poaching him from Canadian SF series Orphan Black in the process) in the fourth through sixth seasons. The replacement was originally said to be down to a scheduling conflict, but Skrein later refuted this and suggested it was more down to “politics.” Skrein went on to join the Transporter franchise and play the main villain in the original Deadpool, so the move did not hurt his career.     Probably the highest-profile recent recasting was in Netflix’s telepathic SF drama Sense8. The premise of the series was that eight people in different parts of the world would become mentally linked to one another, sharing feelings and thoughts. The nature of the show made recasting impossible, so it was a major headache when Aml Ameen, who played the role of Capheus “Van Damn” Onyango, left after filming the first two episodes of Season 2. Ameen had reportedly been very happy in the first season, but came into conflict with showrunner Lana Wachowski at the table read for the second season and this problem came to a head several weeks into production. Ameen was replaced by Toby Onwumere, who reshot all of Capheus’s scenes for the second season (which, given they were shooting on location in Nairobi, Kenya, was not inexpensive). Onwumere was acclaimed in the role and has since re-teamed with Lana Wachowski with a role in The Matrix Resurrections. The nature of the dispute between Ameen and Wachowski has never been revealed.   The reasons for Harris’s departure are unknown and could be down to anything. Many shows have recently faced difficulties retaining cast because of the COVID19 pandemic, with delays to filming backing projects into other projects actors were already committed to. The delays have also resulted in some actors not getting paid for longer periods, or only being the paid the same for what turned out to be a twenty-month shoot as they were for a planned eight-month shoot. There are also the regular possibilities of personality clashes with other actors or crewmembers, or discomfort with the scripts, or the late-breaking realisation that staying with a project for the long haul when it's shooting overseas will mean spending effectively years away from friends and family. Further speculation, although natural, is pointless without more information, which I suspect due to NDAs and contracts will not be forthcoming.   Suffice to say that we hope that the situation has resolved for the best for all parties involved, and we look forward to seeing what Dónal Finn can bring to the role of Mat Cauthon in the second season when it airs in 2022. In the meantime, we have eight episodes of Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon to enjoy, starting on 19 November this year.    As usual, follow our casting and news pages, and let us know what you think of the latest developments.  

Deadline Hollywood reported today that actor Dónal Finn, known for various acting roles including in The Witcher, will replace Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon for season 2 and beyond of Amazon Prime's upcoming Wheel of Time TV show. This news has been confirmed by Amazon Studios.       This is a major surprise because it's almost unheard of to re-cast a main character before season 1 of the show even airs. As of this time, there's no reason given for Harris' departure. It's highly unlikely that it was due to a poor acting performance. If that were the case, then that would've likely been identified very early on during the production of Season 1 and corrected. Harris finished the entirely of season 1. The acting performances of the entire cast were highly praised by showrunner Rafe Judkins and the rest of the team.     In situations like this, it would probably take a major reason for the young actor to be unavailable for season 2. We will not speculate at this time, but overall, the thoughts and well-wishes of the entire Dragonmount community go out to Barney. We hope he is healthy and well.    This re-casting likely caused major headaches for the production of Season 2, which is currently being filmed in the Czech Republic and other European countries.    For more thoughts on this re-casting, check out our TV blogger Adam Whitehead's article on this topic. 

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai   Deadline reports that Sanaa Hamri will be a director and executive producer for half of season two of Amazon Prime's The Wheel of Time.    Hamri started her career directing music videos before moving to directing movies and television. She has recently been the executive producer and director for the series Empire from 2015-2020. Her films include Something New, Just Wright, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.  A 2015 Vulture article highlights Hamri's production skills coordinating the elaborate musical pieces in Empire.    Season one director Ute Briesewitz also held the executive producer title for the first season. Hamri will likely be managing the creative vision for season two.    The other director confirmed for season two is Thomas Napper. To catch up on the first season's directors, check out Adam’s article: Meet the WOT directors.      We also recently had an update on the composer for season one. During a Q&A after the teaser trailer release, Showrunner Rafe Judkins revealed that Lorne Balfe will be the composer for the show.  We heard Balfe's work during the title logo reveal a couple months ago.   

Katy is a news contributor for Dragonmount. You can follow her as she shares her thoughts on The Wheel of Time TV Show on Instagram and Twitter @KatySedai   Mark your calendars for more The Wheel of Time TV show content! New York City Comic Con will host a virtual exclusive Q&A with the cast and showrunner on Oct 8th at 2:30 pm ET. The Wheel of Time twitter account confirmed that this is an exclusive streaming/virtual event for the NYCC. If you are in the area, you can buy in person badges, here. For the rest of us, there are digital tickets for $20, here. The digital tickets cover 4 days of show, access to live video panels streamed during the event for most major panels, audio streams for smaller rooms, and VOD access to the recordings for 30 days after.