Amazon's Lord Of The Rings Has Finished Casting

Amazon's Lord of the Rings live-action TV series has reportedly completed casting for its ambitious first season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Charles Edwards (The Crown), Will Fletcher (The Girl Who Fell), Amelie Child-Villiers (The Machine), and Beau Cassidy (Chinese Food) will join the prequel series.

These newcomers join what's already an appropriately epic-sized cast--in December alone, the show added 20 new cast members--though there's no word yet on who the foursome will be playing. In January last year, an initial cast list included Roberto Aramayo (Nocturnal Animals), Morfydd Clark (Crawl), Owain Arthur (The Palace), Ismael Cruz Cordova (Ray Donovan), and Tom Budge (The Proposition). It's been reported that Clark will play a younger version of Galadriel, the elf played by Cate Blanchett in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, while Aramayo will reportedly play a young hero named Beldor.

Per the reports of younger versions of familiar Lord of the Rings characters, the show will be set thousands of years before the movies in a time known as the Second Age of Middle Earth. In creator J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology, one of the announced locations, Númenor, was destroyed long before the start of the Fellowship of the Ring. If none of this makes any sense at all to you, it's unknown how newbie-friendly the Amazon series may be.

Regardless of your familiarity with the franchise, if you want to brush up on what's going on with the series and its production, here's everything we know so far. (Something to also know is that Elijah Wood, who played Frodo in the popular film trilogy, has some issues with the Amazon show.)

The Amazon Lord of the Rings TV series was first announced back in 2017, and was given a multiple-season commitment. As of this May, it's been reported that the streaming service housed in the retail giant has reportedly spent $465 million to produce Season 1 alone, which would by far make it one of the most expensive TV shows in history.