Amazon’s mega-expensive Lord of the Rings series is slowly coming together ahead of its still-unknown premiere. It will take place during the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy and Peter Jackson’s movies, and J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have been entrusted as the showrunners; Game of Thrones writer Bryan Cogman was also hired as a consulting producer to make sure that Payne and McKay don’t become synonymous with “bad writers.” Speaking of Thrones: actor Robert Aramayo, best known for playing young Ned Stark in the HBO series, “has been cast as one of the leads in the forthcoming Lord of the Rings series,” according to Variety.
He replaces Midsommar‘s Will Poulter, who dropped out last month:
Amazon moved ahead with an early season two renewal for the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels. In conjunction with that renewal, the series will be going on a four to five-month hiatus after filming the first two episodes from season one to map out and write the bulk of the scripts for season two… The show’s cast, which has yet to be confirmed by Amazon, is believed to include Ema Horvath, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, and Morfydd Clark.
Aramayo made his Game of Thrones debut as the doomed Stark patriarch in season six’s “Oathbreaker” and appeared in three more episodes. Hopefully things turn out better for him on Lord of the Rings than they did for Ned Stark on Thrones.
