Amazon’s ‘The Wheel of Time’ brings bestselling book series to life

Fans of the fantasy book series “The Wheel of Time” can sink their teeth into an epic adventure in a new show upcoming on Amazon.

The so-titled series, which begins streaming Friday, Nov. 19, is set in a sprawling world where magic exists and only certain woman have access to it. It is in this world where Moiraine (Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike, “I Care a Lot,” “Gone Girl”), a member of the powerful organization of women known as Aes Sedai, sets forth from the small town on Two Rivers on a dangerous, globe-spanning journey with five young men and women, one of which is the Dragon Reborn, prophesied to be either the savior or the destroyer of humanity.

The series was shot over the past twoplus years primarily in Prague, Czech Republic, with a large cast that also includes Sophie Okonedo, Zoe Robins, Madeleine Madden, Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Henney, Barney Harris and Josha

Stradowski. It also features spectacular mountain landscapes, ample special effects and the performance of Pike, who executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins reports was an easy sell to take on the role of Moiraine.

“She called me and said, you know, ‘This character is me, like I feel her in my bones ...,’ ” he recalls with a laugh. “She just understood the character so fundamentally and had such an amazing grasp of her. And she in all of her work previous to this as well, she’s done such a nice job of balancing warmth and coldness, balancing the softer sides of her characters with the very hard edges of her characters. ... So having an actor that can move really seamlessly between those two things has been amazing for us.”

Also a character in this is the village of Two Rivers. The set construction here, Judkins notes, was elaborate and painstaking and the location of it in the Slovenian Alps only added to the show’s mystical atmosphere.