Interview with ‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 3 Actor Robert Strange

WotSeries had the opportunity to interview Robert Strange (Eelfinn) about Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, which was released on Prime Video on March 13, 2025.

Read more to hear how far he is in the books, his experience getting furry, and a bit about that scream. If you missed them, be sure to check out our other Season 3 interviews.

Cait: I just rewatched your scene again. So fantastically weird. I love it. You did a great job. 

Robert Strange :Good, good, correct. (I believe he is referring to the phrase “fantastically weird’)

Cait: So can you tell me a little bit about how you came to know about Wheel of Time and your casting and audition process? 

Robert Strange: Yeah, of course. Wheel of Time was always on my radar, I somehow had missed it when I was younger and first got into fantasy, but it was always on my radar because I knew how much I would love it.Then, I’d seen season one and two, and then this casting came in. I think I was kind of recommended for it because they knew it was going to be a heavy prosthetics role. I was recommended by Nick Dudman, who was head of prosthetics, who I’d worked with over 10 years ago on a show called Penny Dreadful. I was the vampire in that. So he’d put me forward as someone he knew could sit in a makeup chair for seven hours. And I did an audition tape where everything was in code. All the names were changed, the words were changed, but I kind of started to piece together what I thought it might be. And then when I got the role, I found out exactly what it was. And that’s when I kind of really then dived in and did my research. 

Cait: Did you read the books or at least the parts of the book that apply before you [filmed]? 

Robert Strange: So as soon as I found out what it was, for sure, I started the books and I was determined. I ran out of time a little bit. There’s a lot of material. So I did have to do… I’m now working my way through them, which is great. So I’m so grateful for that. I had to jump ahead and read the relevant moments. But in a way, it kind of works because they are these, you know, literally outside of the world outside of the story, I could find the relevant parts and read those. So I absorbed as much as I could. I drank it all in. What I love about those sections, and his writing in general, is that he gives you real detail. He gives you this feel of something that exists that feels very, very real. But then at the same time, you see with all this possibility and all these questions, which, you know, that’s what makes people coming back to the book say they use their own imaginations to fill it in. And the beauty of doing this show is we got to fill in some of those gaps with people. So hopefully we did it justice. 

Cait: I think so. I’ve read the books many times.They’re behind me. I have a tattoo and I love it. 

Robert Strange: See!

Cait: I’ve loved everything. So they will hurt me if I don’t ask how far you’ve gotten so far in the books. So I have to ask, what book are you on? 

Robert Strange: Book seven. Okay, I’m having a pause while the show is on because I wanted to not have the show on the books at the same time. So I am on a bit of a pause.

Cait: Yeah, I understand, I understand. That’s exciting. You’re about halfway if you don’t count the prequels, so that’s good.

Robert Strange: I’ve got my work cut out for me 

Cait: Yes, yes, it does take a while. So the look is so distinctive.And I was wondering, when you were cast, did you get to know about the look beforehand? Or were they still creating the look of the Eelfin as you came on board? And do you have anything you can share about that distinctive costume? 

Robert Strange: I had to wait a long time to find out really what it was going to look like. In fact, I don’t think I found out until like a month or two, a few months before we filmed. I went out to Prague and had some fittings. They like kind of take molds of your whole body and measurements and everything. And then I got to see some concept art, which was, I just remember looking through this folder of concept art like, this is going to be so cool. Because obviously, all I had before that was the descriptions in the book and people’s amazing concept art, or like fan art online. So that was a special moment.

I’ve done creatures and prosthetics for 12 years. I’ve done all sorts of very, very cool things. And yet this was very special because there were some techniques they used that I’d never had done before. So being furry was, you know, it’s a real challenge to make someone furry. And what was cool is we did this, they did this technique called flocking, where I basically get torso up, I was painted in glue with black paint in it, and then they spray the fur directly onto my skin. And it’s all electrically charged. So the hairs all line up, and then they blow it down with an air gun so that it has this, these patterns like an animal pelt. And then they add orange and yellow, and white and tufts and the wig and the lenses and the fingers and the teeth. So it was…everything you see in the episode was there. It was all real, all practical. 

Cait: Wow. That was the one thing I was wondering. I’m like, how did they do the fur? That’s amazing. The shoes too, I couldn’t walk in their shoes. Those are awesome. 

Robert Strange: The shoes, when I walked into the first costume fitting with Sharon, they were sat at the side and I said, immediately, I said, I hope they’re for me. And she said, thank goodness, because we were really terrified about asking you if you would be happy to wear these. It’s like, of course I will be wearing those boots. They were incredible. They were absolutely impossible to walk in. I mean, they weren’t, they were heels, they were high heels, but there was just no heel. So it was a lot of, you had to kind of not stand still because you have to just kind of keep moving and you have momentum. But that was quite hard in some moments because the scene required some real moments like in Mat’s face where I had to work those leg muscles. 

Cait: Yeah, it had a very like..that gait was very inhuman in a really cool way, which was really awesome. I’m sure everyone will ask you this, but I’m gonna ask anyway, how long did it take and how many days did you have to do it for? 

Robert Strange: So we actually filmed everything, the actual finished footage we did in one day. We did it in one day, but I had about a week or 10 days of fittings and makeup tests and rehearsals before, but we shot the whole thing in one day. That said, it was a very long day. I was looking through my photos, I kept a screenshot of my alarms and I got picked up at 2:30 and I think I got back to the hotel at 10:30 pm, so 2:30 am and 10.30 pm. So it was a long day. The makeup took like just over seven hours, I think. And then it took two hours to take it off at the end of the day because obviously we had to get all the fur off me and the glue. So it was a long process, but A, I kind of love it and B, it was definitely worth it. 

Cait: Like, Dónal probably took a very short time to get ready that day, probably got to sleep in. 

Robert Strange: 20 minutes, I’m sure. But he was so amazing, bless him, he had purposefully asked not to see it until the last moment. So he hadn’t seen any art, he hadn’t seen any of the fittings, he hadn’t, even in the rehearsals on the day, he kind of didn’t look at me until the first take where he looked at me for the first time. So a lot of his reactions are very genuine. And he also…I purposely kept a few surprises up my sleeve. So that morning with Ciaran [Donnelly], the director, I said, look, I’ve been working on the like fox screams, which we all know, when you live in a city and you hear foxes outside, we’re all familiar with that very, very distinct sound. I was like, we can’t play a fox creature without having that in it somewhere. So I stood there and screamed in Ciaran’s face and said, what do you think? And he was like, well, obviously, we have to have this. So I surprised Dónal with that, I think the first few times I did it. 

Cait: That’s amazing. I know we have only like a minute left. So I’ll ask you a quick fun one. If you could play any other role, whether human or creature in The Wheel of Time, what would you want to play?

Robert Strange: Oh, great question. I actually love Loial and I had some wonderful chats with Hammed on set because he hadn’t really done much in prosthetics before.So he kind of found me and was like, can I ask you about your experience? And I was just like, you’re doing it. Like, you’re doing it already. Like, you don’t need me. 

But I just always am drawn to those characters because obviously I spend so much time. And I love to be honest, I would love to be someone who can weave. And I love characters like Liandrin just because I shouldn’t admit it but they’re like Black Ajah. It’s just kind of exciting. Something like that would be very fun. 

Cait: Thank you so much. I hope we get to see, I hope we have more seasons that maybe we get to see you or someone maybe a little bit more snakelike. Maybe you can do that one too. Hopefully we will see you again.

Robert Strange: I am born in the year of the Snake, so that would be very, very apt.

The third season of The Wheel of Time, based on Robert Jordan’s fantasy book series, premiered on Prime Video on March 13, 2025. All episodes of the first three seasons of The Wheel of Time are now available on Prime Video. The series is co-produced by Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios.

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Editorial note: For clarity and readability, we’ve made minor edits to this interview, such as removing filler words and repetitions. The responses remain true to the original recorded conversation.