Warning! This interview contains spoilers for the season three finale of The Wheel of Time!
The third season of The Wheel of Time ended today with an explosive finale episode. And perhaps one of the most exciting moments was seeing one of the most-bizarre characters in Robert Jordan’s books.
But before we get to know more about this much-appreciated appearance, I have a question for you: Do you carry iron, instruments of music, or devices for making light?
That’s right! This episode is the on-screen introduction of Eelfinn, the fox-like creature from another realm who, in the show, messes with Mat in serious ways. I had the chance to interview Robert Strange, the actor behind Eelfinn who also played an orc you might be familiar with from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Read on for our discussion.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
I would love to hear how this came on your plate. What was the audition process like?
I knew I’d been recommended for a job on a show by Nick Dudman, who was then head of prosthetics [on The Wheel of Time], because I worked with Nick before on Penny Dreadful ten years ago. I didn’t hear anything more, and then this audition came in, and it was all in code names, which is quite standard for a lot of auditions, but I just slowly started to piece the puzzle pieces together.
I had a suspicion it might be for The Wheel of Time, but all I was told was the part was this being that was extremely smart, and extremely intimidating, and not of this world. So I did this scene, which was also changed—it wasn’t the final script—and I just gave it a whirl and did a few different takes of it and sent it off. And then, when I got the role, that’s where I got to really dive deep.
I tried my best to read the whole series, but I didn’t quite have enough time, so I read the appropriate parts of the books, and it was then I realized that this was going to be so much fun, because there’s so much detail in the description, but there’s also so much space for playing with it, and designing something, and creating a character. It’s almost limitless really, because it’s just not of their world, so we could go anywhere with it.
I brought in as much as I could from Old Tongue, with [Naomi Joy Todd], the dialect coach, as well as foxes, and noises, and movement, and with speaking to [showrunner Rafe Judkins] and Sarah Nakamura, the Wheel of Time expert on set. It was a fun process, and there was a lot of collaboration.
Calling your performance as Eelfinn otherworldly is not a good enough descriptor of it. I know you talked a little bit about getting motivation from foxes and Old Tongue, but was there anything you really centered on to make it seem so unnatural?
Thank you, and I’m glad that comes across, because ultimately there’s a temptation with this kind of stuff where you just want to be as outlandish and absurd as possible, but then it runs the risk of not having any kind of authenticity. So I tried to approach it like I would any role, even a human role, which is to come up at it asking, “What do they want? What’s the motivation in the moment?”
And so I had some great discussions with Rafe, Naomi, and Sarah about what did the Eelfinn actually get from these people that they encounter, from the questions that they ask, or the wishes they grant, or whatever it is?
That’s hinted at in the books and the lore, but it’s not explicitly told. So we came up with some amazing theories, and you have to then stick with one. And I guess they’ll be our secrets forever, some of the things we came up with which I had to decide on, so that I could run with it and make it as believable as possible. But it was things along the lines of… they get some kind of energy, some kind of sustenance out of the emotions of the people in front of them.
I tried to make that a real practical thing, as opposed to just it being an unknowable kind of magic. I wanted it to be like I’m drawing something out of them, that there’s a reason for everything I’m asking, and why I’m smelling him and getting close, and doing what I’m doing. We really wanted Eelfinn to be terrifying and intimidating and threatening and unsettling, but also a little bit sexy and intriguing and seductive as well.
So it was very fun, really. It was a lot of fun to just play with. And we tried some stuff that really didn’t work, and hopefully some of it did.
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Can you share anything that didn’t work?
So the noises I did: I was quite proud of them, but they went through some iterations. I live in London, so I hear the foxes literally outside my window all the time. If you live in a city, you can’t avoid it, really. But trying to do that is hard. I would sit in my flat alone, like screaming, basically. So God knows what my poor neighbors thought. That took a while to refine so that it sounded like a laugh, but like a fox, but also like something completely new that didn’t end up with me just sputtering on the floor.
So that was a process, and Naomi really helped, because also there’s a technical side to using your voice that way, so that you can do it over and over again. That was actually quite fun. I’m sure some of the noises I came out with on set did not work. I’m sure the editors had some great fun watching me acting in some of those scenes.
I want to talk a little bit about the makeup. Can you talk about the process of getting suited up as Eelfinn and then performing?
The makeup design is all credit to Nick Dudman and his team of artists. They’re the most amazing team of people who not only make it and then apply it to me, but then they stay with me all day to do the touch-ups and look after me and make sure I can breathe and see and not keel over.
I adored the design because it was just so beautiful. Often, the characters I play, I’m in the mud or the dirt or at war or not wearing anything at all. So to have this incredible harness, and the shoes and the detail was fun. The makeup was quite special, because in twelve years of playing creatures, I’d never had something so furry. They did this technique called flocking, which I’d never had before, where they basically painted my whole torso in blue with black paint in it, and then spray the fur directly onto my skin. It’s amazing—they spray all this fur on and the hair is charged so it all lines up, and then they blow it down so it looks like an actual animal pelt. And then they put in the orange and the white, and it was just so detailed. It took a long time.
How many hours?
The whole thing, I’d say, to get set ready, was over seven hours. And that’s before a filming day. I actually went back through my photos and found a screenshot of my alarms that day. I got up at 2:00 a.m. to be picked up, and then I think I got back home at 10:00 p.m.
How many days did you shoot?
For the final shooting, we just did it all in one day. We had a week of tests and rehearsals and fittings and things beforehand. But yeah, the actual shooting was just one day.
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And for my last question, I know you played Glûg on The Rings of Power, who’s obviously a different character than Eelfinn, but I wondered it was there anything you learned from Glûg that carried over to playing Eelfinn?
Good question. I learned something from, I suppose, from every character I do. I suppose the big similarity is just the patience of, and the endurance of, acting through a prosthetic. In a sense, Glûg and Eelfinn couldn’t really be more different in some ways, which was quite fun. Because when I watch other actors, one of my favorite things to watch is people who fully transform—they’re just completely different in every role you see them in. And obviously this odd career path that I forged myself is like that to the extreme.
Physically, with these amazing makeups, I look completely different, but the fun challenge for me is bringing a different performance to it. I didn’t consciously do it, but I loved doing something that was completely removed from the orcs who were really asymmetrical and broken. And Eelfinn was very poised, and still, and scary in a completely different way.
The first three seasons of The Wheel of Time are now streaming on Prime Video.