‘Wheel of Time’ Showrunner Rafe Judkins on That Shocking First Episode Death

[This story contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Wheel of Time.]

Readers of The Eye of the World — the first book in Robert Jordan’s sprawling fantasy series The Wheel of Time — will no doubt note several prominent changes in Amazon’s ambitious series adaptation, the first three episodes of which premiered on the streamer Friday.

Both the book and series begin in the same way as so many fantasy epics — with a group of nobodies who don’t choose greatness but have (potential) greatness thrust upon them. In this case, five youths from the remote farming village of Emond’s Field set off on a high adventure after a horde of trollocs — a sort of large humanoid goat/bull/dog thing — violently interrupts a holiday dance party looking for them. Accompanying the quintet on their search for safe haven is Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) — member in good standing of an all-female cadre of magic-users called the Aes Sedai — and her bodyguard, Lan (Daniel Henney), who’ve also come to Emond’s Field looking for them. They are so in demand, you see, because one of them could be the reincarnation of the so-called “Dragon,” a super-powerful being with the potential to destroy the world, or prevent it from being destroyed. It depends.

Some of the diversions from the book are minor: the youths — Rand (Josha Stradowski), Mat (Barney Harris), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), Egwene (Madeleine Madden) and Nynaeve (Zoë Robins) — have been aged up from teens to young adults; one of their traveling companions doesn’t show up until episode three; in the book, the Dragon can only be male.

But the show’s most notable/shocking departure from the early part of the novel is a) giving taciturn blacksmith’s apprentice Perrin a wife, Laila, and b) having him accidentally kill her with an ax in a battle frenzy after mistaking her for a trolloc.

On the day of the show’s premiere, showrunner Rafe Judkins spoke with The Hollywood Reporter — while driving through the Moroccan desert on a scouting trip — to explain the reasoning behind some of the changes (including Perrin’s uxoricide), the challenges of adapting a beloved property, and why he calls Wheel of Time “the most expensive redheaded stepchild — ever!”

Wheel of Time has been categorized by some as unadaptable series, which used to be more of a problem before the streaming wars. Now, platforms are taking bigger swings with these sprawling fantasy properties, but I’m still curious what sort of issues, if any, you ran into with your pitch?

Yes, there is a big appetite, more than there ever has been before. But streamers aren’t going to make every book series that has been big before. All the executives that we pitched to had never read the books. So the whole way through the process, from the first pitch and getting them sold on the script and getting them to greenlight the series, they had to understand it as non-book readers and see, like, why they would come to it as well.

Between this and The Lord of the Rings, Amazon in particular has put a lot of money toward big fantasy series. And there was a report a few years ago about Jeff Bezos — like everyone, I suppose — wanting his own Game of Thrones. But having read all the Game of Thrones books, there’s not really a lot in common with Wheel of Time. Did you feel any pressure to deliver a more, I guess, adult version of Eye?

I think the whole series of Wheel of Time books is much more aimed at adult audiences than the first Wheel of Time book is. Eye of the World shares way more with Lord of the Rings than it does with Game of Thrones. It’s really very much that high fantasy, adventure storytelling. So for me, I wanted to infuse the first season of the show with a lot of the things that people love about the Wheel of Time series as a whole. But none of those choices were made to chase Game of Thrones. I think any time people tried to put that in the show — or I tried to put that in the show — it just always felt wrong. These are much more hopeful and much more wholesome books than Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones was written as a counterpoint to the high fantasy that had preceded it, with the idea of like, what if this world was much more nihilistic, much darker, much more violent, much more sexual?

You have talked in other interviews about having been turned on to these book by your mom, right? And having other friends, when they found out that you were adapting it, they would send you notes. So presumably some of those people have had a chance to see the first few episodes. Is there anything in particular that they’re happy about, or annoyed that you had to leave out, where you’re trying to be like, “OK, Mom. Don’t worry, they’ll show up in season two”?

Everyone who’s read that the whole series, it’s 14 books, it’s a life investment in a way, like the amount of hours that it takes to read them, and the amount of years that you probably read them across, like, there’s a serious emotional investment that people have in it. Like even me and the other fans of the books who work on the show, everyone has those little pieces that they love that aren’t there. Hopefully, what we’re getting across for people who really love the books is the core of the story and making sure that it really feels like The Wheel of Time, even though there are obviously a lot of cuts to, you know, make it eight hours as opposed to 800 pages. Even in the first three episodes, I’ve seen people be like, “Oh, this character wasn’t there. I really miss them.” But that person we do have a plan for. I think there will be those factors that keep surprising people as they watch it because there are pieces that it feels like we’ve gone past, but we actually find a way to work them into the show later.

Well instead of spoiler-ily asking about the characters that are missing, there is a significant character add in the first episode, which was Perrin’s wife, Laila, who was one part of the pilot’s attempts to give some of the Emond’s Fielders more backstory. In the book, Rand is the only one who is a fairly fleshed-out before they leave town.

So I talked to people, when we first started the adaptation, about like, “What are things you didn’t like about the books?” One thing that pretty consistently came up was people felt like they didn’t really know Mat or Perrin, especially, until later in the books. You can’t really afford, in a television show, for one or two of your seven leads to not be characters that really pop until season four, right? (Laughs.) So one of our big tasks was to make sure that each of these five kids from the Two Rivers, you could understand the kernel of the story that they’ll face in season one — and through the whole series — in that first episode.

After watching the pilot I looked through the Wheel of Time wiki and Perrin does eventually get married, but not to a Laila. Is that character a total invention for the show?

Well, there’s a scene in the books where Perrin says, like, “If I had stayed in the Two Rivers for a few more years instead of leaving, I think I would have married Laila Dearn.” And so that’s what we took as inspiration. For this character that’s extremely internal — you really never get to hear his internal monologue that out loud in the book — we give him a moment at the beginning of the series where you understand why he, across the course of the series, has such a struggle with violence.

Perrin’s killing of Laila is the most shocking part of a massive set piece — the trollocs’ attack on Emond’s Field. In the novel, you see the trollocs attack Rand’s farm, but only the aftermath of the raid on the village proper.

Outside of the first book, one of the hallmarks of the series was that you track all of these characters’ POVs. So that was one thing we really felt like we needed to put in the pilot, was much more of an ensemble feeling. So in the books, you only know what happened to one character on Winter Night, but in the show we are seeing what might have happened to each of these characters during that battle, which, it’s not creating something that wasn’t there. It happened. They had these experiences. We just didn’t get to see what they were [in the book] because we were focused on [Rand].

When you went back to look at this book as something that needed to be adapted to television as opposed to just something that you loved, what was the main thing you felt like you needed to convey about this world and these characters in the pilot, or in the first season?

In terms of the changes that we were making for the adaptation, I think the ones that we put most up front were making it an ensemble piece — make that first book more like the rest of the books — and then the second main one was bringing the Aes Sedai in earlier; they don’t come in until the second book, and they’re such an iconic piece of the IP. Like, I think probably lots of Wheel of Time fans even forget that we didn’t meet the Aes Sedai until the second book. (Laughs.) And those two core ideas, you know, fluttered out into a lot of the other changes that are in it. Like, if it’s an ensemble, we should be seeing what happened to all the characters on Winter Night. If it’s an ensemble, we need to know who all five of these kids are instead of just one of them. If we’re going to meet the Aes Sedai, how do we bring them into this world? At the end of episode three, we see Leandrin and Ilana come in with Logaine in a cage. We took a piece that is in the books — Logaine being captured by red and green Aes Sedai — and pulled it into the show. So that’s usually what we’re trying to do with most of the changes we make, is see if there was something off-screen that did happen in the books that we can pull on-screen. And then in the places where we don’t have it [in the books], like Mat and Perrin’s backstories, for instance, trying to do something that feels authentic to those characters across the course of the series.

So you have found yourself in kind of a dream situation for a showrunner, adapting a series you loved as a child, with a huge budget. But also there’s probably some trepidation as well about adapting such a widely beloved series.

Running this show for me is like both a dream and a nightmare because it’s something that I really love and really want to see brought to television. But there’s also an enormous pressure you put on yourself. I think one of the good things for us is I’m not the only fan of the books on the show. We have other writers in the room who’ve read every single book and grew up loving them. So being able to stress test stuff with those people was really important to me. Like, when we had a person on staff who would [say], “No! You can’t change that!” and then you explain that, “Well, we have to. We can’t tell the story that way because we can’t build these three cities for them to go to or have a character cast in this season when she ends up being one of the main stars of the series three seasons later,” you know, working through those production aspects that have to be changed — and then just the storytelling aspect that have to be changed.

That’s a really good, pragmatic point about production that I’ve never thought of. Like, skipping over characters in the initial season because — again, not to be spoilery — but perhaps a certain character who shows up briefly in the first book who winds up marrying a certain other character later in the series —

Yeah. (Laughs.)

The contract could lapse before you really need them later.

Yeah. You just put yourself in a very vulnerable position in a TV show if you do that. It’s beautiful foreshadowing in a book because you so often are meeting these people or seeing these places that end up playing a huge role later. But to [only] meet a person who plays a huge role later in a TV show means you have to hire an actor, and you can’t hold them from doing anything else in their career for four years just so they can come back to you [when you need them]. It’s just not feasible. And same thing with places. Like, if we’re going to go to one of these cities, we have to devote so many physical resources to it. And although we have a big budget, the ambitions of the books are huge in terms of how much you see. Like, our budget is tiny compared to Lord of the Rings. I’m always like (laughs) we’re the most expensive redheaded stepchild — ever. Yes, we have money, but our money is not unlimited. I wish we were a show that could just light money on fire, but we really can’t. So, you know, the budget constraints are something that’s constantly affecting how we adapt and how we tell the story the best way that we can.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The first three episodes of Wheel of Time are streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.