(Photo Credit: New Line Cinema)
The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum will have some familiar faces in it. The movie’s most exciting character won’t be a fan-favorite return, though.
This week, the cast for the upcoming spin-off movie of The Lord of the Rings franchise gained another big name. Anya Taylor-Joy is set to join the movie as Seren, a Sindar Elf of the Woodland Realm, described as “a trusted and lethal agent of King Thranduil.” Her addition to the cast makes for yet another new actor to join the world of LOTR.
Alongside Taylor-Joy, The Hunt for Gollum will have several new characters appearing in The Lord of the Rings for the first time. These include Kate Winslet as Marigold, as well as Leo Woodall as Halvard. While the movie will feature a ton of returning stars from LOTR, fans should be excited for these new faces, too.
The Hunt for Gollum’s original characters are the biggest make-or-break pieces of the LOTR movie
Of course, the biggest stars of The Hunt for Gollum will be its four major returning stars. Not only is Andy Serkis back and playing the role of Gollum, but Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Elijah Wood (Frodo), and Lee Pace (King Thranduil) are all set to return to the franchise. This will obviously be one of the biggest draws of the upcoming movie, as it’ll be awesome to see the likes of Frodo, Gandalf, and Gollum all back.
However, for the next entry in the iconic LOTR franchise to succeed, the new characters need to be good. The focus of the movie will likely be with the legacy characters, but we’ve seen before from The Lord of the Rings that if a movie relies too far on nostalgia, it can be bad. We need look no further than The Hobbit films, which divided fans at the time of their release. While fans welcomed legacy characters like Gandalf returning, the new movies failed to leave their own stamp.
The Hunt for Gollum has some big shoes to fill in that regard. It’ll be impossible to ever touch the highs that the original LOTR trilogy did. It would also be foolish to chase those highs by simply packing the new movie with legacy characters to drive nostalgia. The best route for the next movie is to allow its new characters to develop in a way the original cast did, and make them just as memorable as they can be to stand alongside the legacy group we already love.
Originally reported by Anthony Nash at Coming Soon
