‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Drops First Look Full of Character Reveals and Plot Details
We are now seven months away from the release of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings series, and marketing is officially underway.
Following up on last week’s massive poster drop, Vanity Fair has now released the first set of images from the series. The first bunch mostly focuses on Galadriel, played by Morfydd Clark, who drives the main narrative as her world starts to fall apart. Vanity Fair said the following about her:
Far from the wise, ethereal elven queen that Cate Blanchett brought to Peter Jackson’s acclaimed films, the Galadriel played by Morfydd Clark in Amazon’s upcoming series ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ is thousands of years younger, as angry and brash as she is clever, and certain that evil is looming closer than anyone realizes. By episode two, her warnings set her adrift, literally and figuratively, until she’s struggling for survival on a raft in the storm-swept Sundering Seas alongside a mortal castaway named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), who is a new character introduced in the show.
This scene is depicted in another image dropped by the magazine:
The Lord of the Rings series is the most ambitious TV show ever, with an estimated budget of $1 billion for five seasons, though the first season alone may have already burned through half of that. While Amazon won’t reveal the budget for the first season, the New Zealand government has estimated that they’ve already spent $462 million. “Spare no expenses” must have said Jeff Bezos, who is apparently a big Tolkien fan. Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, told the magazine:
“He is personally a huge fan of Tolkien and incredibly passionate about all of it and very well-versed. His desire to be ambitious—and for us to be ambitious with our content—has always been clear from the moment I got here. This fit perfectly with that big ambition, to take on something that would require the whole company working together to execute.”
As we could already infer from the posters released last week, the show will have to balance a lot of characters. There will be dwarves from the Misty Mountains, elves from the kingdom of Lindon, and humans from the powerful island of Númenor (see below for more character names and descriptions revealed today). Showrunner Patrick McKay said the following about these storylines and the overall narrative of the show:
“The forging of the rings. Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.”
He then added that the main question behind the plot of the show is the following:
“Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”
Vanity Fair has seen the first three episodes, and said the following:
The show is a lavish, compelling mix of palace intrigue, magic, warfare, and mythology—and there are enough mysteries to power a thousand podcasts. Some characters will be familiar, and they will be the initial attraction as viewers watch their legendary fates unfurl. But the entirely new faces may ultimately become even more involving, since their destinies are literally unwritten.
In addition to Galadriel, another familiar character that we already know is in the series is Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, and now portrayed by Robert Aramayo. In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, elves apparently have shorter hair than in the film trilogy, as can already be seen in the following image of Elrond:
Vanity Fair has also shown the reunion between Elrond and Galadriel, which takes place in the kingdom of Lindon:
In addition to Patrick McKay, the show also has J. D. Payne on board as showrunner, plus Bryan Cogman (co-executive producer of Game of Thrones) as an advisor. The first two episodes are directed by J. A. Bayona (the first is titled “Shadow of the Past”), of The Impossible and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom fame. He told Vanity Fair the following:
“From the very beginning, I trusted these guys. I knew what they were going through and they knew what I was going through also, because can you imagine going back to such a beloved world and [facing] the high bar of the Peter Jackson movies? We were, all the time, very aware of the massive expectations.”
We’ve known for a while the show will explore the Second Age, the period of time after Morgoth has been defeated and Sauron has vanished (the First Age), and before the Third Age, which is comprised of the events explored in Peter Jackson’s movies. In the new adventure, Galadriel is looking for the last remnants of Sauron’s collaborators, who claimed the life of her brother. According to Vanity Fair, Amazon Studios has the rights to the 150 pages, written by J. R. R. Tolkien, titled The Appendices, which were included at the end of The Return of the King — as well as any mention to the Second Age throughout the book trilogy.
According to the Appendices, hobbits did not play a significant role in any of Middle-earth’s big stories until the Third Age, so the showrunners had to walk a fine line if they wanted to include these characters. McKay said the following:
“One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age. But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?”
Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh play two hobbits, who in this age are called harfoots, who come across “a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas.”
Ismael Cruz Córdova (seen above) plays Arondir, an original character from the series, and is the first person of color to play an elf onscreen in a Tolkien project. In a not-so-shocking twist, he’s in the middle of a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage (seen below).
In addition to having the first elf of color, the show also has the first person of color to play a dwarf — Sophia Nomvete, who according to Vanity Fair, has a “scene-stealing role as a dwarven princess named Disa.” She is seen below standing at Khazad-dûm’s entrance. Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series, said the following about the inclusiveness of the show:
“It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like. Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”
And this is really a show for everyone. McKay really wanted to make this clear, as there have been rumors of the show going the Game of Thrones route, with extreme violence and explicit sex scenes. He said:
“[The goal is] to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary—and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated—but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.”
In addition to Galadriel and Elrond, names that will appear in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and may sound familiar to Middle-earth fans include Durin, played by Owain Arthur (see below); Celebrimbor, played by Charles Edwards, who forged the Rings of Power; and a sailor named Isildur, played by Maxim Baldry, many years before he becomes a warrior and cuts the One Ring from Sauron’s hand and is subsequently corrupted by it.
And speaking of the big bad, Amazon has not forgotten about the Lord of the Rings himself, whose presence is felt throughout the Second Age and culminates with its resurrection as a tyrant. Hints of the danger to come are already present as the show begins (in fact, the first episode is titled “Shadow of the Past”), though not many believe them.
J. A. Bayona drew inspiration from his own country’s history, as a dictator named Franco ruled Spain from 1936 to 1975. He said:
“We had a dictatorship for 40 years, so you notice the repercussions of war and the shadow of the past. I think this is all about the repercussions of war. There is an idea that feels very faithful to Tolkien, which is intuition. Galadriel has an intuition that things are not fixed, and there is still something lurking.”
J. D. Payne also confirmed to Vanity Fair one of the theories that have been circulating online — to properly tell the story which they want to tell with the characters they want to use, they had to play loose with the timeline and compress it from what was written by Tolkien:
“We talked with the Tolkien estate. If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”
This explains how Isildur is already present in the first episode of the show, despite the fact that his most important achievement in life happened in the very last days of the Second Age — defeating Sauron by cutting off the One Ring from his hand. The expectations are really high, and many fans were skeptic from the get-go. Payne is not worried though:
“We think the work will eventually speak for itself. Before an orchestra starts, audiences will talk to each other, but then as soon as the music begins, you’re in and you’re listening to that music.”
Additionally, the r/LOTR_on_Prime subreddit had a visit from one of the authors of the article, who said that more content is coming, including a Twitter Spaces event at 1:30 pm PST / 4:30 pm EST. Check it out here:
The first teaser trailer of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will debut on Sunday, during the Super Bowl. Stay tuned for our ongoing coverage.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
