‘The Rings of Power’ Showrunners Already Know How the Series Will End, and More From Their Interview With ‘Empire’
Ever since we got our first look at the new Lord of the Rings series — The Rings of Power — back in February, we haven’t heard much from Middle-earth. But that is about to change.
With now less than three months to go before the release of the series, the marketing campaign is starting to ramp up, and Amazon Prime is kicking things off with the new issue of Empire Magazine. Their new cover story features a lot of content from the show, including some exclusive images and interviews with showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, director J.A. Bayona, producer Ron Ames, and stars Morfydd Clark, Lenny Henry, Robert Aramayo, Markella Kavenagh, and Benjamin Walker. For now, the magazine has dropped online some snippets of their interview with Payne and McKay.
One of the burning questions everyone had in their minds when it was announced, all the way back in 2017, that Amazon intended to make a new series set in the Middle-earth, is how it would compare to Peter Jackson’s masterpiece of a trilogy. As McKay tells Empire, they don’t even try to rival it, but rather, exist in parallel:
“Anyone approaching Lord Of The Rings on screen would be wrong not to think about how wonderfully right [Jackson] got so much of it. But we’re admirers from afar, that’s it. The Rings Of Power doesn’t try to compete with him.”
The Rings of Power will air its first season at the same time HBO streams the new Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon. The two properties share a lot of common ground, obviously, but that is not something that concerns the showrunners. As they explained, Tolkien’s world is much vaster and deals with many more themes than anything in the competition, as McKay told Empire:
“You can psych yourself out in keeping up with the Joneses, but one of the mantras on this was ‘go back to the source material’. What would Tolkien do?
Some of these other competing properties – they play one octave really beautifully. But Tolkien was playing every note on the piano. He had that variety of tones. There’s the whimsy, friendship and humour that ‘Harry Potter’ is so beloved for – but there’s sophistication, politics, history, mythology and depth, too. So for us, it was about going deeper into what we are, rather than worrying about what other folks are doing.”
Amazon has been very ambitious from the beginning with this series, and so far, everything we’ve seen has done nothing but solidify those claims. The first season will have the largest budget in television history, with almost $50M per episode, and Amazon is already committed to a five-season arc. And according to the showrunners, they already have it all laid out. In fact, they know exactly how it’s going to end, as McKay told the magazine:
“We even know what our final shot of the last episode is going to be. The rights that Amazon bought were for a 50-hour show. They knew from the beginning that was the size of the canvas – this was a big story with a clear beginning, middle and end. There are things in the first season that don’t pay off until Season 5.”
They are very aware, however, that this is still Tolkien’s world — they are but the keepers of what he created. Said Payne:
“It was like Tolkien put some stars in the sky and let us make out the constellations. In his letters [particularly in one to his publisher], Tolkien talked about wanting to leave behind a mythology that ‘left scope for other minds and hands, wielding the tools of paint, music and drama.’ We’re doing what Tolkien wanted. As long as we felt like every invention of ours was true to his essence, we knew we were on the right track.”
McKay added:
“The pressure would drive us insane if we didn’t feel like there was a story here that didn’t come from us. It comes from a bigger place. It came from Tolkien and we’re just the stewards of it. We trust those ideas so deeply, because they’re not ours. We’re custodians, at best.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will debut on September 2nd. A new trailer is probably only a few days away from debuting online, and more content from Empire Magazine‘s coverage of the series should be arriving this week, before the new issue hits the shelves on Thursday, June 9th. Stay tuned for more!
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.
