“And I was like, ‘I just want to start with our characters in the Two Rivers and see where they came from.’”īut passion won’t be enough to satisfy his bosses at Amazon: Jeff Bezos doesn’t just want a good show, he wants a good show that has the kind of reach Game of Throneshad for HBO, which means making something that appeals to everyone. “In some ways we have a harder job,” Judkins said, “to tell the audience that, like: This is a show for people beyond fantasy nerds.” And matching Game of Thrones is no easy thing, because as producer Andy Greenwald told GQ, that show “changed the context of what success was.”įrom a production standpoint, everything they pulled off on Thrones someone would’ve told you was impossible. Judkins definitely has a strong connection to the books he’s someone who really cares about this world and these characters. “You know, there were pitches right at the beginning for this show of like, ‘We open with a giant battle’ and all of this cool stuff,” he said.
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I was like: ‘You have to connect to these things emotionally.’” And so when I pitched it, I said the same thing. “And then she could understand, ‘Oh, maybe being a gay man is somewhat like being a woman in terms of the challenges that you face in your life and what it feels like.’ And we can both find ourselves in this.
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He’s been a fan of the books for years they even helped him through a tricky personal time after he came out as gay to his parents. “That was something that kind of connected my mom and me: We could both see ourselves in these books,” he said.
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That would be Rafe Judkins, the showrunner on The Wheel of Time.