Slow Horses star screams at actress and throws her across the floor in astonishing scenes
Magic balls of fire fly across a room, shattering columns and crushing those nearby. A woman is sliced in half, another vomits blood. One fighter bludgeons another to death. With all that happening in the opening 10 minutes of the third season of The Wheel Of Time, it’s safe to say this fantasy drama is not for the faint-hearted.
Sequences like these first brutal scenes need strong performers, as well as strong stomachs, it turns out. “Fantasy action scenes come with challenges – it’s sometimes quite technical,” says Natasha O’Keeffe, who has been in the show since the second season. “You have to keep a real focus throughout the day, so there are a lot of sugar highs, lots of M&Ms!
“Then you get moments where Sophie Okonedo is screaming at Kate Fleetwood and throwing her across the room and it’s just a blast, and you realise we have the best job in the world.”
Rosamund Pike, who stars with Natasha, Sophie and Kate, and also produces the show, explains the opening scenes are just a hint of bigger things to come in a season that is intentionally even more epic than what has gone before.
“We have wanted to grow this show season by season,” she says. “We delivered a second season that was better than the first, which is always the hope. It’s disappointing if your second season leaves people feeling that you fell off a cliff. And I think season three is four times as good as the last one. We’ve intensified all of the relationships, and we’ve intensified the jeopardy.”
Based on the Robert Jordan novels, The Wheel Of Time follows an order of women known as the Aes Sedai, who can channel a magical force called the One Power, and the search for a man known as the Dragon Reborn, who may have his own power to either save the world from evil or break it apart.
By the end of the second season, Rosamund’s character, an Aes Sedai named Moiraine, has discovered the Dragon Reborn is a young man called Rand (Josha Stradowski) and she plans to mentor him, and also protect him from a threatening entity, known as The Dark One, and his followers.
It’s a complex story – there are 14 novels and a prequel filled with mythology that fans adore – and Rosamund has embraced it all.
“I’ve immersed myself in it for the past five years since signing on to play Moiraine in March 2019,” she says. “My knowledge of Robert Jordan’s work has deepened, and now I have read four of the books on audio books, which has consumed hundreds and hundreds of hours of time!”
Natasha, who plays the treacherous Lanfear, admits she wasn’t quite as dedicated as Rosamund when preparing to film the show. “I have to admit I haven’t read the books. It’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to do,” she laughs. “I do have the books beside my bed.
“I like to keep a job as simple as possible, and the fantastic scripts come to me and give me what I need. We also have an amazing book expert, Sarah Nakamura, who I would have on speed dial to ask her any questions. And Rafe Judkins, our showrunner, has been a great source, too.”
For Rafe, it’s a gargantuan task to distill the books into a TV series, delivering exciting stories for the screen while also keeping in fan favourite moments from the novels. “It’s a huge juggling act for us in the writers’ room,” he says. “An iconic piece of the books is the different worlds that they go to, so we put in a lot of time and production effort building those worlds.
“This season, we go to a land called the Aiel Waste, so we all went to South Africa for months to build this place. The costumes, hair, make-up, music – every single person on the production is working their asses off to create a new place to take the audience to, because it is one of the most important parts of the books and one of the things people love most about them.”
Rafe is thrilled that the new season contains elements from the fourth novel in the series, The Shadow Rising, which is one of the most popular with fans.
“The Shadow Rising was really the moment when the books took off and became a monstrous success internationally,” says Rafe. “We’ve been lucky as we are telling the stories that fans really fell in love with when they first fell in love with The Wheel Of Time.”
The Wheel of Time season 3 begins on Prime Video on Thursday 13 March.
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