Amazon’s The Wheel of Time‘s first season is set to debut on November 19th, but when it eventually returns for its second season, it’ll do so with a new face. According to Deadline, The Witcher‘s Dónal Finn is set to replace Barney Harris as the character Matrim Cauthon.
Such a recasting of a show’s central character doesn’t happen all that often, and Deadline notes that the “reasons for the recasting are unclear,” and that production on the second season has already begun.
The character is one of the series’ central viewpoint characters: Mat is one of a handful of Two Rivers villagers who flee with the Aes Sedai Moiraine Damodred (and Moiraine’s Warder Lan Mandragoran) after a sudden attack by the monstrous Shadow-controlled Trollocs. Mat does not know why he is sought by the Shadow, but he remains his typical rogue-ish self until a fateful encounter in an abandoned city skews his path into darkness.
In The Wheel of Time book series, his journey back towards the Light does not conclude until the end of Book 2: The Great Hunt, and he is forever changed as a result. Will the TV show follow that lengthy course, or will it condense the storyline into the first season?
How the show will handle the transition from one actor to another isn’t entirely clear, but we’ll find out when the second season eventually debuts on Amazon Prime Video.
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Well I’ll just go ahead and say it, that’s likely concerning…
It’s always weird when this happens, especially with part of the main cast.
I’m just sad to get this announcement before we have even see S1. Now when watching S1, I’ll be a bit sad when watching his scenes…
Thats weird. I picked up this ruby hilted dagger from shadar logoth, took one look in the mirror and my face changed. I put it down and its still that way. Maybe morraine will understand this, but I don’t like dealing with Aes Sedai. I guess i’ll just make due.
It would be funny if they had his first scene be right after being healed in the tower. It’s almost like he’s a new character in the books once you get I. His head there anyways
My guess is that they’ll soap-opera it — he wears makeup for the dagger down-spiral, then when he’s healed they take the bandages off — I mean Gollum-face — and viola`! (I don’t know how to do those.)
Well, if you had to re-cast one of the main characters, I guess Mat is the least bad option, but this isn’t exactly reassuring…
Clearly they’re jumping way ahead in Mat’s arc for season 2 to where Sanderson took over the series.
Hmmm – I have to admit that most news I’ve seen of this hasn’t really been reassuring to me. I did enjoy the trailer and I like reading the interviews but I still kind of feel that they don’t really ‘get’ the story (or at least haven’t taken the same things from it that I have) but I do think that’s also partially from trying to keep a lot close to the chest.
That said we have no idea what is really going on or how this might be related to the show. I’m still looking forward to it, although maybe more out of curiosity now than anything else!
@8 – LOL. They only said they are re-casting, not surgically removing and transplanting his sense of humor.
@9,
I wonder if it part of it’s the challenge of the show having to being the first major post-Game of Thrones Fantasy TV adaptation and facing a mass audience that’s burned out on the genre after a decade in Westeros.
Anyway, recasting such a crucial character after only a Season is…well, it’s worrying and there are any number of reasons from health, contract dispute, or logistical (ex. stress of overseas shooting in the middle of the pandemic).
Mat is Healed in book 3, not 2.
@@@@@12. birgit
supposedly this is mostly book 1 with some of book 2 and a bit of book 3 so in maybe possible that dagger life happens.
If I were shuffling stuff around and making a show for the masses I would try to speed up the dagger plot line and get to fun bar crawling adventurous Mat sooner rather than later
@11: I think that honour went first to The Witcher and then His Dark Materials (you can probably exclude Shannara and the Letter for the King mini-series).
Such a recasting is somewhat unusual but also not unprecedented, and of course it would happen way more often but in most shows not based on source material, they can pivot and write out the whole character and bring in a new character instead (i.e. swapping Commander Sinclair for Captain Sheridan on Babylon 5). Sense8 is probably the most notable recent example of forced recasting, since the telepathic links between the characters made recasting impossible, so when Aml Ameen left after having a blazing row with Lana Wachowski, they had no choice but to slot in another actor. He did really well and now nobody really cares that one of the leads abruptly changes appearance between the two seasons. If you go back further, you have major roles recast on Bewitched, Fresh Prince and Roseanne, which were all more notable because they were after several seasons, and the replacement actors stayed on for several more seasons afterwards.
Hardly insurmountable.
Too little reliable information to draw satisfactory conclusions about what prompted it.
The nature of how the information has come to light and the retrospective analysis about what seems to be long term signalling, that this was decided long ago and covered up, doesn’t augur well.
Then again, best to have teething problems relatively nebulously, with the prospect of them being overwhelmed and forgotten about by the Substance of the Show itself, in short order.
@8: It’s funny because I so often heard, almost unanimously, that people felt Sanderson didn’t write Mat the same way, but for me Mat was spot on in Sanderson’s version. The writing in general and extremely short paragraphs were more of a divergence.