‘The Wheel of Time’: First Look at Main Character in Amazon Series Revealed

The Wheel of Time TV adaptation released another teaser this week, giving fans their first glimpse at Daniel Henney as al’Lan Mandragoran. Like the last video teaser released for the Amazon Prime original series, this one was painfully short at just six seconds long. However, it shows the very first sword stroke in the war against the Shadow.

The clip shows Lan in full costume, including his braided hadori headband, just as it is described in the books. In voiceover, he says: “You think you know this world, you know nothing.” An eerie screeching noise rings out as he makes a tight lateral swing with his sword, dodging backward at the same time. Other details in the scene are hard to make out, but he seems to be lit by a nearby fire and he wears simple traveling clothes — notably, not his magically camouflaged “color-shifting cloak” from the books.

This clip comes just over a month after a similar teaser that featured five seconds of Moiraine — played by Rosamund Pike. Fans like YouTuber Daniel Greene have theorized that these two five-second clips might be happening back to back and that the light Moiraine seems to be casting in her clip is the same one that’s shining on Lan in his.

However, Moiraine’s voiceover line is: “Do not underestimate the women in this tower,” which suggests that she is in The White Tower, home of the Aes Sedai. Why Lan would be swinging his sword in the tower any time in Season 1 is a complete mystery.

Regardless, fans are aching for a more traditional teaser for The Wheel of Time. The show has been in the works since at least 2018, though it was one of the many productions to be complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Filming began in the fall of 2019 and had to stop temporarily, but it has since started back up. By all appearances, filming is still underway, which means the show has a long way to go through principal photography and then post-production before we will see it ourselves.

The Wheel of Time is based on a series of epic fantasy novels by the same name written by author Robert Jordan. The Series plays with the typical fantasy tropes of a war between good and evil led by a prophecied “chosen one,” with blunt realistic elements thrown in for good measure. The TV adaptation was ordered straight to series by Amazon Studios in the fall of 2018, with Rafe Judkins serving as showrunner.

The IMDb page for The Wheel of Time indicates that it is slated for release some time in 2021, though Amazon’s social media posts just say that it is “upcoming.” While no release date has been announced yet, fans continue to clamor for more teasers like this one online.