For the series breakout second season, showrunner Rafe Judkins pursued a different kind of fantasy.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
I commit to that 100 percent, and Donal, the actor, commits to it 100 percent.
If we both do that, nothing else matters.
There are some books that lend themselves extraordinarily well to television adaptation.Game of Thronesdoes.
The Wheel of Timeis really written like a novel.
I love the books, and I was like, We need to approach it as a whole series.
So for instance, in this season were kind of loosely adapting books two and three.
But as you go through the whole book series, you realize these are thehumanfaces of evil.
On set, we use the drag-queen dial.
Thats the shorthand we use for Lanfear.
But Natasha can deliver all of the layers of Lanfear at once.
She could do all that and make it feel simple.
A lot of the stuff in book one treads the same ground asThe Lord of the Rings classic fantasy.
Then the Seanchan come in in book two and really sideswipe the entire story.
The American accents were the final piece of it.
But then I thought, what if?
It would feel so foreign in our world, and foreign in fantasy.
Egwenes story line this season draws from some really fraught stuff.
Youre referencing real-world slavery, youre breaking someone like 1984, and theres also a BDSM aspect to it.
When we first came to it, I sat down with the No.
Theres connotations and context to the idea of chains and cells and what this means to a person.
That was important to us and hopefully pays off by the time you get to the finale.
Okay, got it.
I guess my only question is, why?The second book, Moiraine is not in it.
They have this really intense conversation where she tries to push him away, and he steadfastly refuses.
But you really cant bench Rosamund Pike for season two of your fantasy show its not great storytelling.
Moiraine is not an easy person to like by hero standards.
The ends very much justify the means for her.
I think what shes willing to sacrifice, it makes her quite heroic, in a way.
If Moiraine is no Gandalf, Rand is no Frodo.
What will the people around him do?
