The Lord of the Rings show from Amazon is one of the most exciting projects on the horizon, though the process of tackling J.R.R. Tolkien’s massive fantasy world and adapting it for a TV series hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the people involved.
For one thing, the team has gone through a lot of changes in the past couple of years, and TheOneRing.net recently reported that the studio has halted production to review the first two episodes and go through the creative vision undermining the series as a whole again. Not to worry, though, as the company also ordered a second season, which implies, at the very least, that they’ve got some sort of control over the situation.
But apparently, the reevaluation process hasn’t been kind to everyone who’s been working on the show. Actor Tom Budge has just announced that he’s no longer attached to the project, writing the following message in an Instagram post.
“Hello loves, It is with great sadness that I am writing to tell you I have departed Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings television series. After recently seeing the first episodes shot over the last year Amazon has decided to go in another direction with the character I was portraying…
I must thank the creative team for their encouragement towards trying something that I believed was new, exciting and beautiful. And I sincerely thank the extraordinary cast and crew for their love, support and friendship over what has been a very difficult and unusual experience. Alas, some things just cannot be.
Destiny my mother, I thank thee.”
Details about the narrative have been so scarce that we don’t know anything about the character that Budge was set to portray, or whether he was important to the show’s future. Then again, if the creatives have decided to cut him out, it was probably for the best, though his description of the experience as “difficult and unusual” might worry some fans in the light of the fact that Tom Shippey, a renowned Tolkien scholar who worked with Peter Jackson on the acclaimed cinematic trilogy, also left the project a while back.
Still, reshoots after the pilot episode are a common occurrence in television, and they usually end up revamping the story. So let’s hope that that’s also the case with the upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series as well, as it was for HBO’s Game of Thrones many years before.
