As The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power prepares to return for its third season, the actor behind the Stranger reflects on finding Gandalf, the art of transformation, and why the most powerful thing a person can do is simply show up.

Before Daniel Weyman became one of Middle-earth’s most mysterious figures, he was a chemistry student with a job offer from Unilever and a fairly conventional idea of what his future might look like. Acting was something he enjoyed, but not something he had seriously considered making a career out of. There was no family precedent to follow, no obvious path into the industry. Then, somewhere between university drama productions and a conversation with his chemistry professor, he began to wonder whether he might be happier doing something else entirely.

“I hadn't thought it was a thing,” Weyman says of pursuing acting professionally. “I hadn't had nobody in my family who was in acting.”

His professor had offered a simple piece of advice: find something that excites you the way a hobby does, something you can return to at the end of the day without feeling as though you've been at work. Weyman already knew what that felt like. He loved the rehearsal process, the collective effort of building an imaginary world and then committing to it night after night.

That decision would eventually lead him to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, where his performance as the Stranger has gradually brought him closer to one of fantasy's most recognizable characters. But Weyman's journey to Gandalf was hardly inevitable. It began with a chemistry degree, an unconventional audition and a willingness to see where an unexpected opportunity might take him.

His first attempt at drama school involved an ambitious transformation. Having played Joe Keller in Arthur Miller's All My Sons at university, Weyman arrived at an audition with talcum powder in his hair to make it look white and wrinkles drawn across his face. He was attempting to play a man decades older than himself. The audition panel was not convinced.

“They said, ‘What are you doing?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘I'm doing All My Sons. You know, this is the thing that I just did at university.’”

The panel pointed out that he was a 22-year-old attempting to play a 60-year-old. Weyman left “with my tail between my legs,” unsure what had gone wrong, before returning to his drama club teacher for help choosing more appropriate material. He auditioned again, earned a place in a postgraduate program and received a bursary that made the decision to pursue acting feel possible.

After graduating, he joined a group of performers taking a production to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. There, a casting director, Anne McNulty, spotted his photograph in Spotlight, the directory used by casting professionals to discover actors. She was looking for someone to play a small fairy role in a Shakespeare production directed by Michael Grandage.

Weyman jumped at the opportunity, traveling between Edinburgh and London to audition while continuing to perform in the festival. He thought the meeting had gone well, but he was not convinced it would lead anywhere. Two weeks later, he received another call: Grandage wanted him to read for a role in his first production at the Donmar Warehouse in London.

He got the part, found an agent and began building a career through a succession of theater roles.

“It just worked,” Weyman says. “I really feel like I was blessed with this big piece of luck.”

He has worked consistently for roughly 25 years since, though he is reluctant to describe his career as the result of a master plan. In fact, one of the most significant changes in his understanding of acting has been learning to relinquish the need to control its direction.

“When I was younger, there's a desire to have control as an actor,” he says. He remembers wanting to play particular roles at particular theaters, imagining the films he might appear in and the people he hoped to work with. Looking back, he is not sure those ambitions were always connected to what genuinely interested him.

Now, he is more interested in the feeling a project gives him when he encounters it. He describes reading a script and recognizing, almost instinctively, that it is something he wants to be part of. Rather than chasing a predetermined idea of success, he prefers to remain open to the possibilities that arrive.

“I'm more aware of the fact that the ways I work out whether I've had a good time or whether I've done something fulfilling is not anymore as it was when I was 20, which would have been how many lines I have or how much press I get or how many posters are of me,” he says. “I really value story. I value collaboration.”

That openness has led him to projects far removed from the scale of The Rings of Power. One example is a short comedy written and directed by Zoë Whittaker, in which Nosferatu, the famous vampire, has given up vampirism to become a foster carer to ten children. The script reached Weyman through a mutual friend. He read it, laughed out loud and immediately wanted to participate.

“It was one of the most joyous experiences,” he says, describing the project as a genuinely collaborative experience that has gone on to screen at international festivals.

It is this kind of creative curiosity that keeps Weyman engaged with acting. He is fascinated by the process of entering a character's world, allowing the character to influence him while bringing something of himself to the performance.

“It's like you open your own armor, and you let the character in and your yourself out,” he says. “And there's some meeting somewhere between the two.”

For Weyman, that process is as physical as it is psychological. He relishes the hours spent in the makeup chair, watching himself gradually transform through the work of makeup artists, hairstylists and prosthetics teams.

He describes arriving at four in the morning as Daniel and leaving around six having nearly become someone else. The transformation is gradual, almost imperceptible until the moment when the actor and makeup artist recognize that the character has arrived.

Playing the Stranger has made that transformation particularly rewarding. The character began as a mystery, even to himself, and Weyman was able to build him without the weight of an established identity. As the series progresses toward the Gandalf audiences recognize from Tolkien's stories, the challenge has become less about discovering who the Stranger is and more about understanding what he has learned along the way.

Before the third season, Weyman spoke with creators Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne about the character's development. They wanted the time jump to reflect a Stranger who had emerged from his earlier uncertainty and developed a broader understanding of the universe around him.

“The idea of eternity gave me a little breath, a little time to contemplate,” Weyman says.

That pause is central to his interpretation of Gandalf. He sees a character who can respond to frightening circumstances without immediately trying to overpower them, who can acknowledge that something is terrifying and still remain beside the people experiencing it.

Gandalf, by contrast, has learned that not everything can be controlled. Weyman sees the character's strength in his willingness to accept uncertainty without abandoning the people who need him.

“Gandalf is okay being scared,” he says. “Gandalf doesn't have a problem admitting that Sauron is terrifying.”

The role has also reshaped Weyman's approach to listening. In the first season, the Stranger had relatively few lines, leaving Weyman to communicate through his physical presence and reactions to other characters. He found himself paying closer attention to the people around him, allowing their performances to shape his own.

“I have become aware of how little, maybe, or how low quality my listening has been other times in my career,” he says. “Playing this part, I didn't have any lines in the first season, so I had to do a lot of listening.”

He now sees listening as one of the most meaningful things an actor can do. For Gandalf, it creates the opportunity to recognize goodness in others and reflect it back to them, offering reassurance without pretending to have all the answers.

“He finds goodness in people, and he can reflect that to them and give them hope that they aren't alone,” Weyman says.

Weyman remembers standing on a hillside in New Zealand while filming a scene with the Harfoot community below. His shot was finished, and the camera no longer needed him, but he wanted to remain there while the scene continued.

“I wanted to just be there,” he says.

He has since become more conscious of the value of those moments of presence, of allowing an experience to unfold without immediately moving on to the next task. He finds himself returning to nature between projects, particularly during the changing seasons in the United Kingdom.

As Weyman continues to bring Gandalf to life, he remains fascinated by the relationship between the character's physical presence and his gentleness. Working with dialect coach Leith McPherson, he explored how voice, breath and physical awareness could give language a sense of purpose. Words, he learned, should not simply communicate information; they should do something.

“It was like a blindfold being taken off me,” he says of the experience. “I was aware of how much of my life I spent not using that part of my own human voice, not using it in that way.”

Gandalf's voice can carry immense authority, but Weyman is equally interested in its capacity for kindness. “There are ways that Gandalf speaks which have uber gravitas and utter solidity, but are exceedingly gentle and loving,” he says.

Perhaps that is what makes the character's armor so fitting. His robe is soft; his hat comes from a friend; even the staff he carries is a piece of old wood. As Weyman points out, Gandalf's protection comes to him through friendship, rather than through the metal and impenetrability that define Sauron's armor. It is a different kind of strength, one that leaves room for other people.

When Weyman speaks about the fans who approach him to talk about Gandalf, he returns to that idea. Whether they have known the character through the books for decades or discovered him through The Rings of Power, he says, “what they identify is a friend. They identify it's someone who supports them and is with them on their journey.”