Warning! This interview contains spoilers for “The Shadow of the Night”—season three, episode six of The Wheel of Time.
Liandrin does quite a bit in the third season of Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time, and we as viewers learn more about her, especially in cold open for the latest episode, “The Shadow in the Night.”
That opening shows us the backstory of Liandrin and her son, and how she first pledged herself to Ishamael. And while this is the first time viewers learn this about the character, actor Kate Fleetwood, who plays Liandrin, knew these details much earlier.
“I knew the story since the beginning of season two,” she told Reactor in an interview. “I’ve had that in my pocket, as it were, so that has informed a lot.”
Fleetwood talked about how she also adjusted her performance when Liandrin heads back to her hometown, and also what she thinks is driving her character now after her son has died. Read on for the full discussion.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
We get a lot of Liandrin’s backstory in this season of The Wheel of Time, specifically when she was a child in Tanchico. When did you know this background of your character, and how did that knowledge inform your performance?
Well, I didn’t. I didn’t know about her son, obviously, until the scripts for those acts in season two came out. So of course, when I spoke to [co-showrunners Rafe Judkins and Justine Juel Gillmer] about it, it begged the question, “What happened? Let’s work this out.” So we worked out that this would have happened, and this would have happened, and unfortunately, this would have happened, but I didn’t know we were going to tell it until we started getting scripts for season three. And I was like, “Oh, we’re going back, we’re going to meet it, certainly in memory.” And so I didn’t know, though I knew the story since the beginning of season two. I’ve had that in my pocket, as it were, so that has informed a lot.
I put on an accent when I’m at home in Tanchico, because in the book, her accent will come out when she’s frustrated or in a high emotional state. And I’ve wanted to put that in my performance all the way through the show. So when the writers said, “We’re going to take her home,” I was like, “Yay, I can do it!” My parents are from Liverpool, and that’s a dock city like Tanchico. It’s edgy, it’s transient, it’s mercantile—there’s all sorts of people moving and blending, and there’s a license to it. And I so I said to Justine and Rafe, “Can I have a Liverpool accent that I slip into very briefly?” And they were like, “Absolutely!”
I know you’ve said before that Liandrin has political motivations. Do you think that’s changed at all in season three, with the death of her son?
I think she still wants the taste of power. It’s toxic. It’s not big enough, it’s not dark enough, it’s that awful thing about never being sated. The gap is so dark, you just try and fill it.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time premiere on Prime Video each Thursday, with the season three finale releasing on April 17. 2025.