Jamie Dornan is set to play Aragon in the upcoming prequel The Lord of The Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, Warner Bros has announced.
The Northern Irish actor, from Co Down and raised in Belfast, is named in the new casting line-up alongside Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Kate Winslet as Marigol, Leo Woodall as Halvard and Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins.
Andy Serkis, who is directing the film, will play the lead role as Gollum and Sméagol.
The recasting was announced during the studio’s presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday, April 14th. The new film is due to be released in December 2027.
Dornan joins the cast from filming on the soon-to-be-released Netflix crime series The Undertow. He is best known for his roles in the Fifty Shades trilogy and Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical film Belfast.
Aragorn was previously played by Danish-US actor Viggo Mortensen in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
The Lord of The Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which returns to earlier parts of the JRR Tolkein books, is set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring.