This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “The Rings of Power.”
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” has confirmed what many fans suspected all along: the Stranger is Gandalf.
In the season finale, the mysterious, gray-haired wizard, played by Daniel Weyman, finally learns his name, acknowledging, “Gandalf. That’s what they’re going to call me, isn’t it?”
The reveal was an intentional slow burn on the part of showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne. The Stranger was introduced in Season 1 as a potential red herring for the villain Sauron (Charlie Vickers), but by the end of the season, it was clear that he was one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Istari, magical beings usually associated with the Third Age of Middle-earth.
But McKay and Payne say the Stranger wasn’t always intended to be Gandalf, a powerful wizard also known in Tolkien’s writing as Olórin.
“No one will believe us, but this was a journey of discovery for the character and the characters around him, and it was a journey of discovery for the writers,” McKay says. “We wanted this to be the origin story of a wizard coming to terms with who he is and what he has to do.”
Payne adds that they went deep into Tokien’s legendarium to look at which wizards would have been around in the Second Age. “Deep in the history of Middle-earth, Volume 12, he confirms that Olórin had already visited Middle-earth. So Tolkien left it open that Gandalf may have come earlier than the Third Age,” he says. “But there were also things that we discovered inside the story that really seemed to fit with the character as you meet him later on.”
There were other options for the Stranger’s identity, including Saruman and the Blue Wizards. But McKay and Payne discarded those because they didn’t make sense for the story. By the Season 1 finale, the showrunners had solidified their decision and reverse-engineered the details from there. The Stranger even uttered one of Gandalf’s most famous lines: “If in doubt, always follow your nose.”
“They had about five different lines that they wanted me to record at that point, some of which were Gandalf in lines and some of which would never [have] been said before,” Weyman remembers. “Obviously, I knew there was resonance there. But as we talked about it, the idea was that it might be nice that a line that Gandalf says was said by an unknown wizard in the Second Age. It’s become a wizard thing over time. All of that played for me because at that point he didn’t have a name and I didn’t need to know it.”
But McKay says the showrunners have not “been trying to play games or trick people. And, in fact, even more clues have been present throughout Season 2 leading up to the big reveal.
“We were really playing with our hands open very early,” McKay says. “The hobbits started talking about, ‘Well, maybe you need a “gand” to help you control your powers.’ I don’t know how much more obvious to be. And later somebody calls him ‘grand elf.’ ”
The showrunners have also dropped visual hints about the character’s identity, including a wizard’s robe that finds its way to the Stranger.
“There’s a delight to watching a character come together, piece by piece, in terms of costume, and there’s a delight to seeing him become the character that you know,” Payne says. “You might also eventually see him get a hat.”
You also see his personality develop, Payne says. “He has a somewhat wry and sardonic relationship with the characters in the Third Age,” he says. “We see him start to develop some of that sense of humor and warmth and and, at times, testy annoyance with these creatures, but it’s always under girded by a deep love.”
Despite the hints, Weyman himself didn’t officially find out about the reveal until the middle of shooting Season 2. The showrunners were finally forced to tell the actor because they needed to film the scene from Episode 8 where Gandalf acknowledges what he will be called. The conclusive scene was shot in Tom Bombadil’s house — a set that was about to be taken down prior to the end of production. The showrunners sat Weyman down and said, “You’re going to be recognizing your name is Gandalf.”
“This was the first time I’d heard anything about it,” Weyman says. “The whole first season was about keeping the audience in the dark about whether he was going to be good or whether he was going to be evil. And the whole of Season 2, I didn’t feel too bothered about the buzz around his name because I was just playing these really precise scenes. To suddenly be given this information was a real pinch-me moment as a 47-year-old thinking back to my childhood dreams of being a wizard.”
Although some of Gandalf’s characterization has been drawn directly from Tolkien’s writing, the showrunners have also taken some dramatic license. The version of the wizard seen in “The Rings of Power” is not the same as the one readers and film fans know from the Third Age. What happens in the planned five seasons of the prequel series will lay the groundwork for who Gandalf becomes when he is better known as Gandalf the Grey.
“What we do on this show all the time is we look for ellipses in the mythology and then those become great opportunities to hopefully fill in the blanks,” McKay says. “Gandalf the Grey falls to the Balrog and then is sent back as Gandalf the White, who’s not exactly the same guy but he is the same guy. This is the idea that perhaps there was an even earlier iteration before he was the Grey.”
“I’m playing Gandalf at the very, very beginning of a journey, as opposed to what we might know later on — thousands of years later,” Weyman adds. “He has to experience things. He has to make mistakes. So that gives us license to be different from where Gandalf might end up. The only way of becoming wise is through lots of life experience.”
A key element to revealing Gandalf’s identity is the onscreen introduction of Tom Bombadil, an important character in Tolkien’s legendarium. Bombadil, played by Rory Kinnear, is a mysterious immortal being with significant wisdom and power. In “The Rings of Power,” he appears in Rhûn as a guiding force for the Stranger.
“In the first season [my character’s] been in this relatively small microcosm of the Harfoots,” Weyman says. “They’re very small in terms of the universe. He hasn’t had any experience with anything bigger than that and then he comes into contact with Tom, who knows what is eternal forward and backward.”
Tom sets up a conundrum for the Stranger, who has to choose between saving his Harfoot friends and embarking on a journey of power by selecting a staff. Ultimately, he helps Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot and Poppy Proudfoot — and gets the staff in the process. McKay says they wanted Gandalf to earn his staff in “the most unexpected way,” which Tom confirms when he tells the Stranger that the “staff picks the wizard.”
Holding the prop was an “extraordinary” moment for Weyman, who says two staffs were made for shooting purposes.
“It was just so beautiful,” the actor says. “When I touched it, it really felt like I had hoped in my head this idea of him finding a staff would feel like. That suddenly there’s a connection between all that this tree had lived and its connection through its roots to the soil and the earth and everything down there. And it felt like a friend. This is his new companion.”
Gandalf’s journey in Season 2 ends with him saying farewell to Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and joining Tom in his house where he speaks his name and the pair join their voices in song. The lyrics for the tune, “Old Tom Bombadil,” were drawn from Tolkien’s writing, although Payne and composer Bear McCreary rewrote them to fit the series. A version sung by Rufus Wainwright appeared at the end of Episode 4, but in the finale, Weyman and Kinnear performed a few verses.
“There’s a way a song laces into your being, and I tried to play with the idea that the song is one of those things that the Stranger can vaguely remember, a bit like the sunset,” Weyman says. “He might have heard this before and he might have felt like he was coming home, in a way, and that was quite fun.”
Payne and McKay have ideas for how Gandalf can evolve in future seasons. For instance, in the Third Age, the five Istari are forbidden from destroying Sauron with their magic.
“Why might that prohibition be put in place?” Payne says. “If you have five wizards and it’s five on one, why couldn’t they just take on Sauron in an all out wizard grudge match? That’s a question that we’re looking at in terms of, what journey does Gandalf go on in the Second Age that might make that prohibition exist in the Third Age?”
Still, there is a general plan the showrunners want to follow, which includes Gandalf.
“We were very fortunate to get hired for this gig because we pitched it as heavily-serialized, long-form storytelling — a 50-hour movie,” McKay says. “So while there are discoveries along the way and you never want to be locked into a plan that misses something that could be better, the signposts that we’re hitting are holding to that plan. We have a destination and an arc and a journey for him that will hopefully tie into later stories in a way that is unexpected.”
Playing the character is a “privilege” for Weyman, but the actor also doesn’t want to succumb to the pressure of embodying such a significant literary figure.
“I’ve been with the Stranger now for four years and the essence of him is solid,” Weyman says. “The only change is that people are going to start calling him a different name. But I think he knows what he is and what he wants to become.”
