At long last, Brian Cox comes to Middle-earth. The Succession star is voicing Helm Hammerhand, a legendary king from the history of Rohan, in the new animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which means we won’t actually be able to see Cox adorned in armor or wielding a warhammer. But this exclusive new behind-the-scenes video from the making of the movie provides the next best thing: watching Cox and his costars record their performances for the action-packed animated fantasy.
“There are these characters who become larger than their myth, and Helm is part of that tradition,” Cox says in the clip, above. We also see him recording some of the king’s badass war cries, such as “We will paint the dawn red with the blood of our foes!”
Much of what we know about Helm comes from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s appendices to The Lord of the Rings, in which he describes the history of Rohan. Located in the central plains of Middle-earth, Rohan’s territory is ideal for breeding horses but also makes the kingdom vulnerable to attack from outside forces. As a backup plan, the Rohirrim also have a mountainous fortress they can retreat to when things look bad.
The official name of that fortress is the Hornburg, but by the time of The Lord of the Rings proper, it’s better known as Helm’s Deep. The War of the Rohirrim tells the story of what Helm did to inspire that name.
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Aside from Cox’s Helm, the other protagonist of War of the Rohirrim is the king’s daughter, Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise). The character is nameless in Tolkien’s text, but producer Philippa Boyens (who co-wrote Peter Jackson‘s classic live-action Lord of the Rings movies) and screenwriter Phoebe Gittins wanted to tell her story.
“We could feel the weight of being that unnamed daughter, which immediately piqued our interest: Who was she? How did she live?” Boyens told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year.
Watch the featurette above for more.
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