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Where Have You Seen the Stars of Amazon's 'Lord of the Rings' Series Before?
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Where Have You Seen the Stars of Amazon's 'Lord of the Rings' Series Before?

By Petr Navovy | Film | January 15, 2020

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Header Image Source: HBO

I love The Lord of the Rings. Both the books, and the movies. The books were tremendously important to me when I was younger, and the movies are even more so now that I’m in my—I guess—‘proper adult’ years. I was a teenager when I saw them first, all in the cinema as they came out, each time waiting the year’s pause out with a white hot eagerness that could’ve melted through that treacherous c**t Saruman’s snows on Caradras. I bought all the extended, six-disc DVDs, with the hours upon hours of behind-the-scenes footage that in the end I probably watched even more than the actual movies themselves (and trust me, that’s saying a lot). The references and quotes from those films became as much of a shared additional language between me and my friends as classic Simpsons lines. That’s partly because of their undeniable—and with each passing year increasingly striking—quality, but also because we saw them during one of the last pit stops before beginning the transition to adulthood. So for me and a lot of my generation, they’re not just great movies, they’re one of those emotional life rafts, loaded with fond memories associated with a simpler, easier time, that you carry through with you into the choppy waters of adulthood, grabbing a hold whenever you need reassurance, or momentary (three-hour) escape.

All that is to say I am interested in Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings series. I am. I just can’t help it. That billionaire bellend dropped a quarter of a billion dollars to secure the rights to the property for his stupid network, and that annoys me. Like, why him? Sure they’re all roughly as bad as each other. But man, still, why him?

Anyway, Amazon Prime have now announced their main cast for the show.

And they announced with an annoying-as-f**k thread that doesn’t show the actor’s faces until you click through on every single link. So I’ve collected all of them here, because who has the time to do that? Here, then, is the (mostly relatively unknown, for now) cast of Middle Earth heroes and—shock horror!—it turns out that that fantastical realm of balrogs and magic actually has some (some, not too many, let’s not go nuts now eh?) people of color living in it. Who knew?

Nazanin Boniadi (Previously appeared in: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Hotel Mumbai, Bombshell, Homeland, How I Met Your Mother, The Next Three Days, Iron Man)

Robert Aramayo (Game of Thrones)

Owain Arthur (Doctors)

Tom Budge (The Proposition)

Morfydd Clark (Dracula, His Dark Materials, The City and the City, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)

Ismael Cruz Córdova (Miss Bala, In the Blood, The Mandalorian—‘Qin’)

Ema Horvath (The Gallows Act II, The Mortuary Collection)

Markella Kavenagh (Romper Stomper, Picnic at Hanging Rock)

Jopseph Mawle (Game of Thrones, Sense8)

via GIPHY

Tyroe Muhafidin (nothing, this is his debut role; he’s the kid on the right in the picture below)

Sophia Nomvete (nothing, debut role)

Megan Richards (Wanderlust, Doctors, she’s the one in the bottom, centre-left)

Dylan Smith (I Am The Night, Into The Badlands, Maze Runner: The Death Cure)

Charlie Vickers (Medici)

Daniel Weyman (Silent Witness, Poirot, Foyles War)

And here, briefly a reminder of the context of this show, which takes place a whole Age before the book and movies: