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‘The Rings of Power’ Showrunners Give New Season 1 and 2 Details, New Spots Released

by · August 15, 2022

The Rings of Power

Middle-earth is coming back… to the small screen this time, as Amazon Prime is getting ready to release the most expensive television series of all time, The Rings of Power, in just three weeks.

 

The marketing campaign is moving full steam ahead right now, with new details, interviews and pictures being released by most online sites on an almost daily basis. Just today, TIME Magazine revealed a lengthy feature piece on the upcoming series, featuring some behind-the-scenes details about their showrunners, some teases about what’s to come in seasons 1 and 2, and much more.

 

The piece was put together during San Diego Comic-Con, where The Rings of Power had a heavy presence, including its Friday panel where they released a 3-minute trailer (that also dropped online) and several clips that were exclusive to Hall H attendees. Amazon invited a group of journalists, including TIME‘s Eliana Dockterman, to follow and interview some of the cast and crew of the series. Dockterman got to spend some time with showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay, who have been for the past couple of months two of the main faces of the marketing.

 

The two longtime friends were working at Bad Robot under J. J. Abrams punching up scripts, including a fourth Star Trek movie that never saw the light of day. In 2018, shortly after Amazon acquired the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they convinced Amazon executives to ditch safe bets like a Gimli origin story or an Aragorn/Gandalf prequel and embrace the full potential of the texts they had just acquired. They pitched a Second Age story that would act as a prequel to Peter Jackson’s movies but stand on its own, and would include dozens of characters across multiple races and locations. Due to the short lifetime of the human and hobbit/harfoot race, the show wouldn’t be able to also span over centuries of time, like Tolkien’s Appendices, which the show is loosely based on, do.

 

The Rings of Power

 

This is a story right that already screams Lord of the Rings. Back in the 1990s, Peter Jackson saw the door shut on his face at multiple studios when he tried to pitch an adaptation of Tolkien’s books into two movies, as no executive would agree to green lighting a sequel to a movie that hadn’t even been made yet — until New Line Films chairman Bob Shaye was so impressed with the pitch that he said “Isn’t these three books? Why not three movies?” He also proposed filming all three at the same time.

 

Tolkien’s expansive world would have been shorthanded with a two-film adaptation, the same way doing an Aragorn spin-off show instead of exploring the vastness of the Tolkien Legendarium would have made the world smaller. Amazon saw this and gave the thumbs up to Payne and McKay’s pitch to adapt the Second Age stories into a five-season series for Prime Video. But now, they have to deliver.

 

Much like Jackson 25 years ago, the duo does not lack the enthusiasm. They have been working on this non-stop for 4 years (Benjamin Walker, who plays Gil-galad, revealed recently that JD Payne called him to pitch him the role while his wife was in labor), but they are doing it from a place of love and passion. According to the TIME feature, they would start every day at the writers room with a Tolkien quote, and end it by congratulating every member in the room on their work. They are also very aware of the huge bet Amazon is making on them, as McKay explained:

 

“Amazon is taking a humongous swing betting on us, who might not, from the outside, look like the safest bet. That’s good, I think. Storytelling is too safe these days.”

 

The Rings of Power

 

And Amazon betting on them is a literal statement — the show has already cost Jeff Bezos over $1 billion, including $250M that he paid for the rights and $468M they spent on the eight-episode first season, making it the most expensive series of all time. The second season, which TIME says will begin production in October (it’s unclear if they mean actual filming or pre-production work, though it’s probably the latter), will make that bill even larger. Jeff Bezos, a self-proclaimed Tolkien fanatic, insists that this is not purely a cash grab series. In an email, he told TIME Magazine:

 

“Middle-earth is such a beloved world, and telling the story of the forging of the Rings of Power is a privilege and a responsibility. I hope we do Tolkien’s work justice. It goes beyond making a commercially successful show. Everyone working on the show read these stories as kids and our hearts are in it.”

 

So far, without seeing a full episode of the show, we can safely say that Amazon is doing justice by investing a lot of time and money on building out an expansive world that feels familiar yet fantastical. According to some loud voices on the Internet, Tolkien is rolling over in his grave over the thought of having, for instance, a young Galadriel wearing armor (Welsh actress Morfydd Clark plays the Second Age version of the iconic character).

 

The author, though, was very inconsistent about Galadriel throughout the years, something the showrunners and the actress used to their advantage. The showrunners, however, were keen on walking the fine line of preserving Tolkien’s work as much as possible while also trying to make the show they wanted — time compression was a necessary tool so that elves, who live for thousands of years, can interact with the same humans throughout the five seasons of the show (season 1 will already introduce Isildur and Elendil, two key players in the final battle of the Second Age). However, Payne and McKay were in constant communication with the Tolkien estate:

 

“At key moments they would weigh in, and we would write letters back and forth and communicate and make sure we were doing something all of us could agree on to move forward with the story.”

 

The Rings of Power

 

Another big source of “controversy” (as if that was another legitimate name for racism) has been the casting of a Black Latino actor Ismael Cruz Córdova as the elf Arondir, a character that was created for the show. While the showrunners accept criticism as part of the job, they will not accept discrimination. Córdova, on his end, insists that this is very meaningful to him, saying:

 

“I didn’t see myself represented. And when I said, ‘I want to be an elf,’ people said, ‘Elves don’t look like you.’ When I heard about the character on the show it felt like a mission.”

 

And when did he even hear about it? Well, it wasn’t until the night before his very last reading during the casting process that he was told his character was actually an elf — up until that point, they had told him they were looking for an “Aragorn-type man.” But we are jumping ahead, because apparently, Córdova got rejected several times over the months-long casting process, but he kept on trying until he got the part and celebrated it by screaming for joy in the middle of New York City.

 

These types of casting anecdotes that, for better or worse, will be told and retold many times until history becomes legend, and legend becomes myth, are no stranger to Middle-earth projects. Viggo Mortensen was famously cast as Aragorn after production had already started on The Lord of the Rings trilogy with a different actor playing the part. The late Christopher Lee, probably the biggest Tolkien fanboy on set, auditioned for Gandalf and was offered the role of Saruman instead. (Lee was reading the entire book trilogy once a year long before the movies were even conceived, so he wouldn’t have forgiven himself if he didn’t get a role in the movie adaptation.)

 

 

And they are not the only ones in The Rings of Power. Charlie Vickers, who plays Halbrand, a human that Galadriel encounters when she travels to (or ends up by chance in) Númenor, auditioned for the show eight times over six months. Cynthia Addai-Robinson, who plays the magnificent Queen Regent Míriel of Númenor, got the part after auditioning for two different roles.

 

All actors were sworn to secrecy, as they couldn’t even tell their families what project they were joining. (Sooner than later, they all found out, as production was forced to shut down 25 days into filming due to the pandemic.) The showrunners have insisted that, despite Tolkien laying out the basic plot points the story will follow, The Rings of Power contains a lot of secrets and twists and turns that fans will not expect.

 

One of them, for instance, is the identity of a bearded man that two harfoots find in the middle of the forest after a meteor crash. First identified as Meteor Man, the marketing campaign has since named him The Stranger. He is played by Daniel Weyman, and his actual identity will be a long-running mystery throughout the entire first season, at least. At Comic-Con, Stephen Colbert tossed around the idea that this could be Gandalf. This is once again teased by TIME Magazine, which makes us think that either Amazon planted that idea in the heads of the journalists present during the Comic-Con event (and thus ruling out Gandalf as the true identity of The Stranger, as they wouldn’t just reveal it like that), or Dockterman was inspired by Colbert’s theory while writing her article. Either way, we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to find out for ourselves.

 

 

When the character was first introduced in the Vanity Fair blockbuster piece back in February, many thought at first this was Sauron. The title character of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy would be returning to Middle-earth after the defeat of his former Lord, Morgoth, at the end of the First Age. Sauron was not extinguished, and much like what happens in Fellowship of the Ring, Galadriel fears his return is upon them while everybody else is acting naïvely. What makes his return even more unforeseeable is that he is a shape-shifter, and can disguise as whomever he wants. In fact, Tolkien wrote, he will eventually assume the identity of Annatar and convince the elves to forge the rings that will almost bring the world to collapse.

 

In a clip released recently, we saw Galadriel and Halbrand looking for the Lord of the Rings, much like online fans are doing. After the release of the Comic-Con trailer, thousands of fans online were fast to assume that the trailer had just included not only the first explicit reference to Sauron, but also the first time he was seen on screen — he was quickly (mis)identified as being played by Anson Boon. This is not him though. This character, of identity still unknown, is played by Bridie Sisson, The Rings of Power executive producer Lindsey Weber revealed to TIME Magazine. She said:

 

“We are enjoying all the speculation online and can tell you Bridie Sisson is an incredible actor. We also thought fans might like to know that her character is traveling from far to the east—from the lands of Rhûn…”

 

For Tolkien aficionados, this is a very obvious tease, though. Rhûn is very familiar territory to Sauron, who forged an army there of Easterlings that would fight alongside orcs against other species from Middle-earth.

 

 

Looking ahead at season 2, Payne revealed that The Rings of Power will soon introduce a beloved member of the Tolkien Legendarium:

 

“We don’t want to give too much away, but one character we’re excited for folks to meet in Season 2 is Círdan the Shipwright. In the time of our story, he’s the oldest of all known elves in Middle-earth—in fact he lived so long, he had a beard.”

 

Season 2 will have more updates. As previously reported, Amazon is leaving New Zealand and will film the new season in England. And according to TIME Magazine, the director lineup for season 2 will be all-female, though no word has been said about who they will be.

 

Stay tuned for more news on The Rings of Power as the series enters its final stretch of the marketing campaign. New promos are being released on Twitter every day, sometimes even twice a day. You can check out below some of the latest:

 

 

 

 

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