James R | On 13, Oct 2022

With The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power finally streaming on Amazon Prime Video, the prequel has been setting up a surprising number of mysteries despite us knowing the end point for the overall story. While many of those revolve around where – or who – Sauron is and how he will bring about his plan to forge the titular rings in the seasons to come, one of the most pressing puzzles is the identity of someone introduced in the very first episode: The Stranger.

Played by Daniel Weyman, the figure falls from the sky at the end of Episode 1 in a fiery ball, before making friends with Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards), two Harfoots who find him – unclothed – in the ground.

We caught up with Daniel just as Season 1 premiered to find out what he could tell us about the character.

“The sides that I originally got were sort of minimal,” he explains of the auditioning process. “They’d obviously written some stuff that was character-based, but it might not have been the text that was ultimately going to appear on screen. So I had to self-tape with that. I ended up spending days, just, you know, doing it. So I’d done all this work, probably thought it was not going to go my way and sent that off. And then, several months later, there was a call saying can you come meet the casting director. From then, there was sort of this sort of drip of information where a little bit more info came through.”

“I had a chat with the showrunners and they clearly liked a bit what I’m doing. They gave me more info, a couple of film references, I went back did a different scene, they wrote a new side. And I began to feel a bit more confident in how I’d understood the character because obviously it’s a slightly nebulous idea. Then I heard that they were running me past the Tolkien estate and, you know, all that kind of stuff – I think we all had to be vetted on multiple levels. I was just, you know, sort of slightly numb by how crazy it seemed.”

One of the things that makes The Stranger such an intriguing figure is his lack of dialogue – or, at least, his lack of intelligible dialogue, with most of his lines involving grunts, groans, gurgles and other languages.

“I’ve got plenty of lines in the eyes,” he says. “A lot of body language, and lots of mouth opening. But it was really fun to do what I enjoyed playing with physicality and body language and communication.”

As for what his character wants, Weyman says: “It’s pretty obvious that he’s got a deep sense of his own purpose. I think he’s driven. And I think we see quite early on how that begins to manifest itself and the ways in which he behaves are going to resonate through not maybe just the first community he meets, but also others.”

“The sort of battle of good and evil is present, you know, within and around him. And I think he’s, you know, he’s a shadowy and enigmatic character, but he’s certainly struggling to find his identity.

“I hope that the audience will come on that journey and be excited and you know, want more and more of that journey I went on.”

For more on The Rings of Power, read our review of Season 1 here.

 

Who is The Stranger? We round up the theories

Sauron

The Stranger’s identity ties up closely with another question – who, exactly, is Sauron? Whether Season 1 decides to unveil his identity or location, it’s hard to shake off the simple solution to the mystery: Sauron has fallen from the sky as a burning meteor, in the form of a man with no memory of his purpose or power. After all, we know that Sauron was corrupted by Morgoth, so he has a pre-Sauron form as we know him. We also know that Sauron will appear not as we expect, as he finds ways to manipulate people into forging the Rings of Power ahead of his ascent to power in time for The Lord of the Rings. But, by the point when we join the story, Sauron’s plans need to be gaining momentum, so it seems weird that he’d rock up to his own party so late in the day. However, we also know that the three sinister elf-looking villains – only referred to as “The Dweller”, “The Ascetic” and “The Nomad” – are following him and the Harfoots, so somebody bad clearly thinks he’s important.

Gandalf

The temptation to bring back even more familiar faces from The Lord of the Rings – along with Galadriel, Elrond and Isildur – must be hard to resist for this prequel, especially when it only holds the rights to Tolkien’s trilogy and appendices. Therefore, the notion that the Stranger is Gandalf is hugely appealing as well as possible. The fact that he’s bearded and walking around in a makeshift cloak doesn’t hurt either. The problem is that we are so long before the Third Age of Middle-earth, when Gandalf as we know him was knocking about, that it feels like too big a distortion of the timeline just for a cameo from a friend. Before the Third Age, though, Gandalf was called Olórin – he was one of the “Istari” (wizards) sent to Middle-earth to help against the rising threat of Sauron. His love of the halflings could well have been built up by some formative time spent with Harfoots.

A Blue Wizard

The Istari were part of the Maiar, a group of spirits created by the Valar to first help shape the world. The Istari comprised five wizards, including Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast, but there were two others who are not mentioned explicitly in The Lord of the Rings but are briefly referred to by Tolkien in the novels. In The Peoples of Middle-earth, Tolkien wrote about these two Blue Wizards sent to Middle-earth in the Second Age, saying that they came long before Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast. He wrote they “must have had very great influence” in the Second Age, which chimes in with what Daniel Weyman said to us about The Stranger – that “the ways in which he behaves are going to resonate through not maybe just the first community he meets, but also others”.

Glorfindel

One of the less likely theories doing the rounds is that The Stranger could be the returned form of Glorfindel, the mythical elf hero. He dies in the First Age, but was sent back by the Valar as an emissary with powers almost as strong as the Maiar.

A balrog

Just foe the fun of the idea, what if The Stranger is actually a balrog waiting to happen? The balrogs began as fiery Maiar types who were corrupted by Morgoth. The timelines, however, don’t quite fit, and in Episode 7 of The Rings of Power we caught glimpse of something stirring in the mines of Khazad-dum…

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