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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The Eye of the World: Book One of The Wheel of Time
