Will Poulter is First Actor Cast for Amazon's Billion-Dollar Lord of the Rings
A billion dollars. One billion dollary-doos. One thousand million United States quids. It's almost too big a sack of cash to imagine. How many Olympic swimming pools and double-decker buses is that? It's loads. Absolutely loads.
Amazon has announced how it's started to spend the gigantic wedge of exactly that size set aside for its Lord of the Rings TV series. Variety reports that Will Poulter, last seen being led into some woods to (Midsommar spoiler alert) be turned into a straw-stuffed skin-bag by chirpy Swedes, has bounced back from that disappointing end to his holidays to be the first actor cast in the series.
We don't know what role Poulter has signed up for, but he does seem like he'd make a very good elf. Or, given that he was very good as the grumpy conceited arsehole Colin in Black Mirror's 'Bandersnatch', perhaps he'd fit in with the dwarf lords.
Reports last month suggested that the series would have to completely swerve everything that was shown in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, on the orders of the notoriously stringent Tolkien estate. Instead Amazon will rummage through the Second Age, which Tolkien wrote about in the posthumously released Unfinished Tales.
Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar who's working on the series with Amazon, told German fansite Deutsche Tolkien that "the Tolkien estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered."
"Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenórean expedition, is returns to Númenor," Shippey said. "There he corrupts the Númenóreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same.
"But you can add new characters and ask a lot of questions, like: What has Sauron done in the meantime? Where was he after Morgoth was defeated? Theoretically, Amazon can answer these questions by inventing the answers, since Tolkien did not describe it. But it must not contradict anything which Tolkien did say."
This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk.
* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
