After decades of being left out of many Lord of the Rings adaptations, Tom Bombadil is finally getting his moment in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The mystical character is set to appear in the second season of the Prime Video series where he will be played by Rory Kinnear (No Time to Die).
You can check out a handful of first-look photos of Tom Bombadil in The Rings of Power below.
Tom Bombadil appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring novel, helping Frodo Baggins and his friends on their journey. Dressed brightly with a penchant for nature and silly songs, Bombadil is one of the few creatures in Middle-earth that the One Ring has no power over. Described by J.R.R. Tolkien as “older than the old,” his appearance in The Rings of Power, which takes place thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings, fits his character.
While speaking with Vanity Fair, The Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay teased just how Tom Bombadil will fit into their series. “There’s a reason why he hasn’t been in prior adaptations, because in some ways he’s sort of an anti-dramatic character,” Payne said. “He’s not a character who has a particularly strong agenda. He observes drama, but largely doesn’t participate in it. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the characters kind of just go there and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.” McKay added: “Knowledge that’s not particularly relevant to anything that they’re doing or about to do.“
The second season of The Rings of Power finds Tom Bombadil journeying to the lands of Rhûn, which used to be green and beautiful but has been turned into a dead wasteland. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings,” Payne said. It’s there that he will encounter the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), as seen in the photos above. “When he finally crosses paths with the Stranger, you could say he has a desire to try to keep the destruction that has happened there from spreading to his beloved lands in the West,” Payne explains. “He nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about. So I’d say our Tom Bombadil is slightly more interventionist than you see in the books, but only by 5% or 10%.“
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 will premiere on Prime Video on August 29th, and a third season is in development.