Yahoo News Rings of Power Season 2: Rory Kinnear to Portray Fan Favorite Tom Bombadil — See the Photos!
Tom Bombadil finally gets to dance in the sun.
The beloved Lord of the Rings character will make its live-action debut in Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, TVLine has learned.
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Penny Dreadful and The Diplomat vet Rory Kinnear is set for the role in the coming season, premiering Thursday, Aug. 29 on Prime Video. See photos of Kinnear as Bombadil below.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring novel, Frodo & Co. encounter the singing, childlike being while passing through the Old Forest on their way to Rivendell. Old Man Willow, a great willow tree, swallows Merry and Pippin into its massive trunks, and Bombadil saves the Hobbits by singing the tree to sleep.
The character was omitted from Peter Jackson’s big-screen trilogy, though John Rhys-Davies’ Treebeard uses some of Bombadil’s book lines in The Two Towers while chatting with Merry and Pippin in Fangorn Forest.
Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have made a small tweak to the character in Season 2, giving him a second home on the outskirts of Rhûn (home of the Easterlings, whose army was seen entering Mordor’s Black Gate by Frodo, Sam and Gollum in Jackson’s The Two Towers.)
“In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn, which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland,” Payne explains to Vanity Fair, who first reported the story. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”
That is where the Stranger, Nori and — per Vanity Fair — Poppy land in their search for the mysterious constellation from Sadoc Burrows’ map. In Rings of Power’s Season 1 finale, Nori and the Stranger set out on this new adventure while Poppy chose to stay behind with the Harfoot caravan.
Bombadil, who doesn’t want the destruction there to spread to his lands in the West, “nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about,” Payne notes.
With Sauron’s Halbrand disguise now exposed, upcoming episodes find him manipulating the Orc leader Adar as his darkness spreads across Middle-earth. Bombadil, according to Payne, is “sort of a curiosity within that structure because while it is darker, Tom Bombadil is singing and saying lines that could be nursery rhymes from children’s poems.”
Are you excited to see Tom Bombadil in Rings of Power Season 2? Sound off below!
Rings of Power Season 2: Everything We Know
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