We’re just days away from the second season of The Wheel of Time on Prime Video and we couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come.
Source: Jan Thijs / Prime Video
Global Grind Sr. Content Director Janeé Bolden spoke with Marcus Rutherford and Dónal Finn about the upcoming second season of The Wheel of Time on Prime Video. Dónal, who steps into the role of Mat Cauthon in Season 2 (after Barney Harris exited the series) spoke about being a newcomer on the show.
“It’s a great cohort to join and it’s been a joy to jump into something that’s so epic and gigantically ambitious as this you know,” Finn told Global Grind. ” And to investigate things that are like stretching us in two different ways as an actor – it’s to investigate the large scale, the life and death circumstances of each day for these characters and just the ambitiousness of what they set out to achieve and to you know take part in the center of a fight of good and evil and also to like investigate them in their day-to-day and how they relate to each other and what kind of people they are and recognize that the challenges that they face are just what we face on our day-to-day but just in a different context. They’re battling with esteem and adversity and grief and I feel really lucky to be jumping into something like this and I feel incredibly like the experience for me was made so supportive by the cast.”
If you watched the first season of The Wheel of Time, which is based on the best-selling Robert Jordan fantasy series of the same name, you were introduced to Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) and his friends Mat (Dónal Finn), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), Egwene (Madeleine Madden) and Nynaeve (Zoe Robins) as they leave behind their home following a deadly attack by dark forces. The group is guided by two powerful beings, Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike) and al’Lan Mandragoran but ultimately their paths break into separate directions. In the new season, Rand discovers that even though he thought he destroyed the Dark One, evil is not gone from the world. In Season Two, threats new and very old seek out the young friends from the Two Rivers, now scattered over the world. The woman who found and guided them is now powerless to help, and so they must find other sources of strength.
We will find soon after the beginning of Season 2 that some of the questions raised about Perrin are being answered in the new episodes. Marcus discussed Perrin fully coming into his powers and embracing his relationship with his wolf pack with Global Grind.
“In Season One obviously he spent a lot of time grieving and with a huge amount of guilt, which actually means that he’s going through something and he probably doesn’t voice what’s actually going on in his head as much as the other characters,” Rutherford told us. “So he kind of is developing a slower pace. In Season Two he’s kind of forced into other scenarios and he meets new characters and one of them introduces this wolf brother kind of scenario. We saw a little glimpse of it in Season One, but he starts to realize that there is something completely different about him. There’s something about his natural instincts and the kind of powers that he possesses and it changes the way he sees things. He has these visions that we see at the start of Season To and he starts to realize that he might not be the kind of person he always thought growing up.”
Speaking of visions, we had to ask both Dónal and Marcus about how acting on The Wheel Of Time has affected their real life dreams, or in Finn’s case, his daydreams.
“To be honest, maybe just daydreaming as the character sometimes,” Dónal Finn told Global Grind. “That’s kind of handy because things that might have been introduced to us or for me in the process when I was learning about acting was like going on a walk with them and understanding like you know thinking in character and asking how they might relate to a certain space or if you’re in the park or a certain coffee shop, what would they think about that and how does that differ? To me, I think daydreaming as the character has been really useful and sometimes, depending on what’s next, required on the day and the scene and what it requires from you, doing that in between takes is really useful as well and just helps to keep a certain kind of mental focus.”
For Rutherford, his wolf co-stars have also found their way into his dreams.
“I think I joked about the wolf I work with once,” Marcus recalled. “I was spending a lot of time working with these animals and I had to befriend them. I just go behind the studio set, so it was kind of a garden or a bit of grass and we just used to walk around, hang around all the time. I started learning these check words that were commands and I yeah started to go a bit insane, but I started to dream about dogs a bit.”
We can’t wait for you guys to see Perrin and the wolves in the new season.
Season Two of The Wheel Of Time goes live on Prime Video Friday, September 1st.
Will you be watching?
