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"The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" Season 3 has arrived, and with it, a new batch of faces for the show's sprawling ensemble cast. One new addition is Thráin, brother of Durin IV (Owain Arthur) and exiled prince of Khazad-dûm. If Thráin looks familiar underneath all of that dwarf makeup, it's for a reason: The character is portrayed by British acting veteran Eddie Marsan, who you've likely seen in action somewhere before.
Marsan was born in London in 1968 to working class parents and initially trained as a printer's apprentice. Acting was his dream, but he knew it was a long shot. "If you want to be an actor in this country, and you come from a disadvantaged background, you have to be exceptional to have a hope of a career," he told Sky News. Luckily, a local bookmaker agreed to put up the money for him to attend the drama school Mountview.
He spent several years as a struggling actor after leaving drama school, getting by with minor stage parts. It was 1992 when Marsan landed his first credited TV role in an episode of the British sitcom "The Piglet Files." Over the next few years he popped up in the long-running soap opera "EastEnders," the hospital drama "Casualty," and the cop show "The Bill." His first main role came in 1997 when he was cast in "Get Well Soon," a BBC comedy series set in a 1940s tuberculosis sanatorium.
Marsan has worked with many huge names in Hollywood
Warner Bros.
Eddie Marsan has been in a bunch of acclaimed British films such as Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky," Paddy Considine's "Tyrannosaur," and Edgar Wright's "The World's End," but he's also worked with several big directors in Tinseltown. He played Killoran in Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," Sergeant Fry in Steven Spielberg's "War Horse," and secondary antagonist Brownway in J.J. Abrams' "Mission: Impossible III."
Among his most prominent movie roles is that of Scotland Yard investigator Inspector Lestrade in 2009's "Sherlock Holmes," starring Robert Downey Jr. in the titular role. Lestrade acts as a foil for Sherlock, and Marsan was impressed by Downey Jr.'s ability to improvise. "His mind is always working," he told Coming Soon at the time. "I've never worked with Robert before, but he's very very very creative, his mind is racing all the time, and the character of Holmes is like that as well, but he's also very disciplined."
Marsan reprised the role of Lestrade for the 2011 sequel "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," which, like the first film, was a box office success. Other notable big screen credits include "Snow White and the Huntsman," Will Smith's superhero movie "Hancock," and "Deadpool 2," in which he played the headmaster of the Essex Home for Mutant Rehabilitation. More recently, he played Matt Hagen's underhanded personal business manager Frank Fitzpatrick in the dark DC movie "Clayface."
What does Thráin's arrival mean for the Dwarves?
Ben Rothstein/Prime
As for his new role in "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," Eddie Marsan will be donning a mountain of prosthetics so he can join the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm as they navigate a Balrog, new Rings of Power, and an acute political crisis in Season 3, which will function as a soft reboot. While there are multiple characters named Thráin in Tolkien's source material, they all lived much later in Middle-earth history. Like Durin III (Peter Mullan) and Durin IV, many of the Dwarven characters in the show have been pulled out of context from the source material's sprawling, multi-millennia timeline to fit the compressed Second Age storyline.
Whether Thráin is supposed to channel an original Tolkien character or not, it's clear that he's entering the story at a pivotal time for the Dwarves. Their subterranean existence was rocked at the end of Season 2 when a newly awakened Balrog began terrorizing their kingdom and even killed King Durin III. While Durin IV had taken up the mantle of King of Khazad-dûm by the time the credits rolled, it was clear that his exiled older brother, Marsan's Prince Thráin, was planning a visit to the kingdom — potentially to spark a succession crisis. We'll get more insight into what Thráin's arrival means for the Dwarves when "The Rings of Power" Season 3 premieres on Prime Video on November 11, 2026.
