Somewhere in Navarre, a dragon has just been told to hold still for a costume fitting. Prime Video’s adaptation of Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing has cast its two leads, with Esther McGregor playing Violet Sorrengail and Emilio Sakraya playing Xaden Riorson. Deadline broke the news on 15 October.
McGregor is best known for Prime Video’s We Were Liars. Sakraya’s credits include Those About to Die and Warrior Nun, and he has just finished filming the third season of Netflix’s One Piece, where he plays the rebel leader Koza. More importantly, as far as a sizeable chunk of the internet is concerned, he has been the readers’ pick for Xaden for years, and spent the wait posting cryptic Instagram images that fans pored over with the intensity of Cold War codebreakers. It turns out the hints were, in fact, hints. That almost never happens in fandom, and somebody ought to mark the occasion with a commemorative bookmark.
For the uninitiated, Violet is a twenty-year-old who had planned on a quiet life of ink and archives in the Scribe Quadrant, until her mother, a general, orders her into Basgiath War College to compete for a place among the dragon riders. Basgiath’s idea of pastoral care is a narrow bridge and a long drop, and the cadet death rate makes Hogwarts look like a spa weekend. There she meets Xaden, a mysterious, brooding cadet from a rebel bloodline who wields shadows and very possibly has never had a relaxing afternoon in his life. They start out as enemies. It’s romantasy, so you can probably fill in the rest yourself.
Behind the camera, Meredith Averill, co-creator of Locke & Key and a producer on The Haunting of Hill House, is showrunner, having taken over from Moira Walley-Beckett. Westworld‘s Lisa Joy is directing the first episode, and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society is among the producers. Amazon bought the rights in 2023 and ordered the show to series this year, with an eye on adapting all five planned books if the first season takes flight. Three are out so far, Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm, the last of which reportedly sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, and Yarros is writing the fourth.
Yarros’ one stated condition on casting was that Xaden shouldn’t be played by a white actor, so that box is ticked. Everything else is now open season. The fancasting circus has already moved on to Violet’s childhood friend Dain and her fellow cadets, and there will doubtless be strong opinions about the dragons, who will need to be convincingly enormous, sarcastic and telepathic, ideally without the budget being eaten in the first episode.
No release date has been set. Still, for a project that has kept BookTok refreshing the trade papers like a hungry dragon eyeing a sheep pen, two leads in the saddle will do very nicely for now.
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