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You don't know range until you go from playing a lich-lord necromancer to being a high-born (and high-cheekboned) elvish beau, but Jamie Campbell Bower is doing it. The big bad of Netflix's Stranger Things is now confirmed to be playing the elven lord Celeborn, a.k.a. Lord of Lothlórienm, a.k.a. Lord of the Galadhrim a,k.a. Lord of the Golden Wood, a.k.a. Prince of Doriath, a.k.a. Galadriel's husband, a.k.a. Elrond's father-inlaw, a.k.a. Arwen's grandfather. 

Oh yeah, he's also dead - or at least Galadriel said so in the first season of Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.

Bower's casting was known since February 2025, but who he would be playing has been a mystery for the intervening 15 months as they filmed the series. But now with the season filmed, post-production underway, and a release date (or at least month) of November 2026, they are starting to fill in the gaps of what to expect by releasing this news through Empire Magazine.

EXCLUSIVE💘

Jamie Campbell Bower’s role in The Rings Of Power Season 3 is confirmed: he plays Celeborn.

The Elf lord is a “lover-boy”, Bower tells Empire, teasing a romance with Galadriel. “This idea of longing and yearning is so pervasive.”

READ MORE: https://t.co/PA88a3KXwB pic.twitter.com/sV4jtHxhBn

— Empire (@empiremagazine) July 22, 2026

In Tolkien's original stories, as I mentioned, Celeborn is best known as Galadriel's husband, and their daughter Celebrian grows up to marry Elrond, and they give birth to Arwen (and her brothers, the twins Elladan and Elrohir). In the first season of Prime Video's Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Galadriel says Celeborn is dead - which is contrary to the original stories and even the movie series, which shows him alive and well as far as The Return of the King, to sail with Galadriel off to the Undying Lands. Then again, Bower played a necromancer in Stranger Things... so playing a character we were told is dead should be no stretch for him.

So for Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, either Bower's Celeborn is only going to be seen in flashbacks or Galadriel was mistaken that he was dead, and his return could be a key part of the series. That would also lead to some deliciously complicated romance drama, as in TV series Galadriel had a romance with Sauron (yeah, that Sauron), which was not in the original books either.

With Bower's casting, he is also one of the most famous actors cast in Amazon's Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. As much as we are fans of Ciarán Hinds (Rome, forever), Bower joins the series after a career-defining portrayal as the big bad Vecna in Netflix's Stranger Things.

“When I joined this show – again, I don’t know why I take these videos of myself – my brother helped me with the audition for it. I have a video of me in the car, having just found out that I got the role in complete tears," Bower told Popverse's Ashley V. Robinson earlier this year at Seattle's Emerald City Comic Con. " Because he didn’t pick up the phone, I left him a video, and I was like, ‘Sam, we did it. It’s amazing.’ That feeling was with me throughout the process of making it. I would drive to Shepperton and just kind of be like shaking my leg, talking to my younger self, being like, ‘Can you fucking believe this? We’re here. We did this.’ I had the best time."

"The world as we know it is beautiful, and I just feel very grateful and very lucky again to be a part of that. It’s a story that so many people know, but it’s also a story that so many people hold dear to their hearts, and I do not profess to be an expert. But I can tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed my time on it, and I’m so very grateful to have been the guy that did it.”