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Shohreh Aghdashloo Joins “The Wheel Of Time” As Elaida

MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE WHEEL OF TIME UP TO BOOK FOUR: THE SHADOW RISING, AND SPOILERS FOR THE WHEEL OF TIME SEASON THREE, AHEAD!

Some surprises are not lessened for having been spoiled well over a year in advance, and Shohreh Aghdashloo being cast as Elaida in The Wheel Of Time season three is certainly one of those. Aghdashloo, an immensely talented Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning actress best known for her roles in sci-fi drama The Expanse and HBO’s The Batman prequel series The Penguin (and for her distinctive, gravelly voice, which she has lent to animated series Arcane: League Of Legends, fantasy film Damsel, and video game Assassin’s Creed: Mirage), is a huge get for Prime Video’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s fourteen-volume epic fantasy series, standing on equal footing with star Rosamund Pike and guest star Sophie Okonedo (both Oscar-nominees). And fans have been waiting for this announcement for a very….very long time.

Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala in The Expanse. She has long dark hair in a braid. She is wearing a red-and-gold sari.
Shohreh Aghdashloo in The Expanse | imdb.com

It all began back in December of 2021, while The Wheel Of Time was airing its first season and The Expanse was airing its sixth and last. Both shows being on the Prime Video home page resulted in a lot of crossover between the two fandoms, and people started fan-casting Aghdashloo as various characters from The Wheel Of Time books who had yet to appear in the show, particularly the cantankerous sorceress Cadsuane Melaidhrin. Aghdashloo took notice and even brought it to Wheel Of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins’ attention, tagging him in a fateful tweet that read: “Hi, @rafejudkins, the fans say, we need to talk”. Judkins responded: “Girl, I’m in. I don’t know how to use Twitter but if I did I would DM you. You’ve been on my mood board for a certain character since 2018 haha”.

We now know that the character Judkins had in mind was not Cadsuane at all, but rather Elaida do Avriny a’Roihan, an even more important character in the books who takes an antagonistic role to protagonists Rand al’Thor and Egwene al’Vere, not because she’s a Darkfriend, but because she genuinely (and mistakenly) believes she’s the most qualified person to lead the fight against the Dark One. Elaida is a divisive character: some readers (myself included) regard her as one of The Wheel Of Time‘s most compelling villains, while others find her unbearable or almost comically misguided. I am nonetheless confident that the adaptation which somehow turned us all into Liandrin Guirale redemption arc truthers will give us a reason to begrudgingly sympathize with Elaida, maybe even root for her. Aghdashloo’s casting makes it a near-certainty that her shenanigans will be more entertaining to watch than they sometimes are to read about, that’s for sure.

Elaida is a member of the Aes Sedai, the order of female channelers (sorceresses) who have historically used their considerable power to try and repair a world that was deeply fractured three-thousand years earlier during the Breaking, when all the male Aes Sedai went mad and turned on each other. Elaida belongs to the Red Ajah, the largest faction of the present-day Aes Sedai, whose primary task is to hunt down male channelers and subdue them before they can go mad and cause another Breaking. Elaida is one of the most powerful Aes Sedai alive, equal in strength to Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche, and at one point seemed to have her eye on ascending to the Amyrlin Seat (the leadership position which Siuan currently holds). It therefore came as a shock to many when Elaida abruptly moved to the nation of Andor and became the full-time advisor to Queen Morgase Trakand, seemingly conceding the Seat and ending her promising career in Aes Sedai politics. What none realized was that Elaida had the rare Talent of Foretelling, and had seen in a vision that the royal line of Andor would be the key to victory in the Last Battle: which she interpreted to mean Morgase’s daughter, Elayne Trakand, who can channel and is indeed stronger than Elaida herself.

Wide shot of the Hall of Sitters in the White Tower, from The Wheel Of Time. A woman in a long red gown is sitting on the Amyrlin Seat, with a dark-haired woman in a white dress sitting on the armrest at her left hand.
The Amyrlin Seat | youtube.com

Elayne began training at the White Tower in season two, and was almost immediately kidnapped by Liandrin Guirale, an Aes Sedai of the Red Ajah and secretly a member of the unofficial Black Ajah made up entirely of Darkfriends. Her abduction was covered up, and Liandrin was consequently able to avoid being caught for a time, but season three opens – Rafe Judkins has said this, the teaser trailer confirmed it, and footage from the sequence was shown to CCXP attendees – with Liandrin finally being exposed, and subsequently activating a whole bunch of Black Ajah sleeper agents amongst the Aes Sedai to help her escape punishment. The ensuing massacre (my word choice, but that’s what it looks like to me) will rock the Tower to its core; and amidst the upheaval that must surely follow, Elaida will return at long last, probably looking for Elayne and instead finding the Aes Sedai in total disarray, enflaming in her a fierce desire to fix the Tower, even (or perhaps especially) if that means getting rid of Siuan Sanche and replacing her with a more competent, capable leader, someone like…oh, I don’t know, Elaida herself.

To say any more would require me to get into major spoilers for The Shadow Rising, the book being adapted in The Wheel Of Time season three, so I’ll leave it there and let you discover what happens next when The Wheel Of Time returns on March 13th, 2025. In the meantime, share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

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Meera Syal Cast As Verin In “The Wheel Of Time” Season 2

After months of fervent speculation, the mystery of who Meera Syal is playing in The Wheel Of Time‘s soon-to-be-released second season is finally solved. Nerdist exclusively confirmed yesterday that the popular British actress and comedian, best known for her work on The Kumars At No. 42, The Sandman, and Doctor Who, and for the semi-autobiographical novel Anita And Me that was adapted into a 2002 film, will portray Verin Mathwin of the Brown Ajah next season on Amazon’s The Wheel Of Time, and presumably for many more seasons afterwards, given that the character has a prominent role in the source material, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s fourteen-book epic fantasy series.

British actress and comedian Meera Syal, standing against a dark background. She has short dark messy hair, dark eyeshadow and lipstick, and smiles as if she knows a secret. She is wearing a black blazer.
Meera Syal | scotsman.com

It’s been said many times already, but I cannot overstate this enough: do not look up Verin Mathwin if you do not wish to be spoiled for one of the most brilliant character arcs in fantasy literature! Too many readers have already learned the hard way that Google and other search engines will respond to even the most innocuous questions about the books with answers that hold nothing back, while slightly further down the first page of results you’ll find yourself bombarded with answers to other readers’ unrelated questions about events in the last book. Why take that risk, when you can sit back and let me explain to you who Verin is without spoiling anything for the books beyond The Great Hunt, where she first appears? I will be thorough, but brief.

Verin Mathwin was born and raised in the city of Far Madding, and would have happily stayed there and wed her childhood sweetheart Eadwin if the city’s strict rules against channeling didn’t forbid her very existence. Forced to leave behind her home, her family, and the life she’d always known, Verin saw no other choice but to travel to Tar Valon and seek training at the White Tower. She was “raised to the shawl” within eleven years, and chose to join the ranks of the Brown Ajah; archaeologists and scholars whose passion is the pursuit of knowledge and the reclamation of secrets lost during the Breaking of the World. Verin is the first Brown Aes Sedai we meet in the books, and inarguably the most important character belonging to that Ajah, but because she’s rather unusual amongst Brown Aes Sedai in that she is often outside the Tower, the books subsequently spend very little time in the Tower’s Brown quarters, which is a bit of a shame. Hopefully, with Egwene and Nynaeve returning to the Tower in season two for their own training, every Ajah will be eager to take them on a tour of their separate, distinctly decorated corners of the Tower. I’m most excited to get a peek into the Brown’s extensive archive of ancient, magical relics.

The Hall of Sitters in the White Tower, viewed from high above. White stone seats on low stone plinths form a ring around the edge of the Hall, and seated here are groups of Aes Sedai belonging to the seven color-coded Ajahs, though only the Green and Red Sitters are visible. Between these two groups is a large throne, and here is seated the Amyrlin Seat. Before her stand two women, while a third, wearing blue, kneels on the ground.
The Hall of the White Tower | pajiba.com

Anyway, back to Verin. In book two, The Great Hunt, she and her Warder Tomas arrive in Fal Dara alongside the Amyrlin Seat Siuan Sanche, which is a sequence I think will be altered for the show so that Moiraine and Siuan don’t meet again so soon after their emotional parting in the first season. Maybe Verin will come in place of the Amyrlin, or maybe things will unfold very differently, but however she’s introduced, it’s an important development early in the book that Verin ends up being entrusted with many of Moiraine and Siuan’s closely-guarded secrets after independently deducing that one of the boys from Emond’s Field is the Dragon Reborn. Leaving her Warder in Fal Dara, Verin then decides to follow Rand and Perrin (again, independently) as they hunt for the stolen Horn of Valere. That may not be possible in the show with Rand and Perrin being on separate paths, but I could envision a scenario where Verin follows Perrin while Moiraine goes after Rand and Siuan takes Egwene and Nynaeve, ensuring that each of these unpredictable ta’veren has a trustworthy Aes Sedai looking out for them at all times (Mat’s already accounted for, in the hands of the Red Ajah).

I’ve also seen speculation that, in a departure from the books, Verin could be introduced in the city of Cairhien – an important stop on Rand’s journey in The Great Hunt – and that if Rand ends up there earlier than in the book just by wandering aimlessly south from the Eye of the World, he might start learning from her about what it means to be the Dragon before reuniting with Moiraine. In the book, Verin does give him some valuable lessons on the mechanics of Portal Stones, mysterious gateways built before the Age of Legends that allow their users to pass out of time and space, through “Worlds that Might Be”, which we might call alternate realities. This is very similar to the Ways introduced in season one, however, and I could see where some viewers might get confused or frustrated if the show keeps inventing new techniques to get characters from one side of the continent to the other in minutes, without major consequences.

Moiraine Damodred, wearing a blue riding-cloak, sits on a white horse in a field of short grass looking up at two monumental brown stone pillars standing on a low plinth with steps carved in it. It appears to form a gateway, yet there is nothing on either side of it.
Moiraine at the Waygate | meaww.com

My lips are sealed regarding Verin’s role in The Wheel Of Time going forward, but I can absolutely assure you that she’s a far more important character than she might seem at first glance, and with Meera Syal in the role, I’m sure she’ll be as instantly lovable and funny as she was in the books. Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below, but make sure not to spoil anything for new readers and fans of the show!