Leo Woodall will play Halvard in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, Warner Bros. said Tuesday afternoon at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, joining a cast that also includes Jamie Dornan as Strider. Strider is the alias used by Aragorn, the ranger at the center of the franchise’s most familiar quest.
Andy Serkis will direct the film and return as Gollum, while Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen and Lee Pace are also coming back as Frodo, Gandalf and Thranduil. The studio said the film is slated for release on December 17, 2027.
For Woodall, the role puts him into one of Hollywood’s most durable fantasy properties at a moment when Warner Bros. is trying to revive New Line’s Middle-earth franchise for the first live-action theatrical return to Tolkien’s world since The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The new film is set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring and draws in part from J.R.R. Tolkien’s footnotes, with the story following Aragorn’s perilous quest to capture Gollum before the creature can reveal the Ring’s location to Sauron.
The casting also sharpens the film’s link to the earlier movies. Viggo Mortensen played Strider in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, beginning with The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, alongside Wood, McKellen and Serkis. Deadline previously reported that Kate Winslet will join the film as Marigol, adding another high-profile name to a project built to reconnect with an audience that helped the earlier trilogies gross nearly $6 billion worldwide.
That scale is the point. Warner Bros. is not treating The Hunt for Gollum like a side story, but as a full return to the franchise’s core mythology, with Serkis steering the project and several of the original screen icons back in the frame. The remaining question is whether the film can turn nostalgia, and a deep cut from Tolkien’s notes, into the kind of event that made Middle-earth a global box-office force in the first place.
