(SPOT.ph) While Prime Video already has their satirical superhero show The Boys and their coming-of-age romance trilogy in The Summer I Turned Pretty making waves with audiences, what's most likely to end up as the crown jewel of Amazon's streaming service is its upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power, which drops in September.
The series, which has been touted as the "most expensive TV show ever made," looks like a fantastical follow-up to Peter Jackson's film trilogy of the early 2000's, which saw the third film Return of the King bringing home 11 Oscar wins in 2004. However—as the saying goes—this is not your daddy's, granddaddy's, or even great-granddaddy's Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power is a prequel series, set thousands of years before Lord of the Rings, that also introduces wholly original characters never seen in either the original books or the previous films.
All rings considered, we had lots of questions for the show's cast and showrunners, who we recently got to sit down with and discuss the making of the new series.
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Here's what the Rings of Power cast and showrunner revealed about the Lord of the Rings prequel series:
The Rings of Power starts off in the Second Age, whereas the events of Lord of the Rings take place at the very end of the Third Age. For showrunner J.D. Payne, the Second Age was exciting, as audiences could come to the series "with no prior knowledge of anything that’s come before," but he adored the Second Age for a myriad of other reasons. He said:
"For [co-showrunner Patrick McKay] and I, really quickly, this idea of the Second Age become one that we got obsessed with. We feel like it’s [author J.R.R. Tolkien’s] “untold, big epic,” with the creation of the Rings of Power and the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron. We’ve only ever seen Sauron as a big, flaming eye in the sky. This is a time when he’s on Middle Earth, embodied, and is able to be working, manipulating, deceiving, and doing all these things to rise to power, so that was really intriguing to us. The Numenor’s, as well, have never been visualized before. The Last Alliance of Elves and Men we also felt was a story worthy of being told on the scale that could really fit Tolkien’s imagination. [The Second Age] brought all those things together, and because of that, we very quickly zeroed in on it as the story we wanted to tell."
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Having a deep admiration for the music of Middle Earth, as all Lord of the Rings fans do, we just had to ask about how the musical identity and tone of Middle Earth's Second Age was crafted for the series, especially given how they brought back the films' composer Howard Shore for the opening theme and the prolific composer Bear McReary for the series' main score. Payne replied:
"Music is so important in Tolkien. It’s literally how the world was created. If you read some Tolkien, there’s the song of the Ainur that’s part of the very creation of Middle Earth, so we knew we had to get the music right. We wanted to capture that hauntingly beautiful tone of Middle Earth. There’s a point in the books in which they say 'all stories in Middle Earth are sad, but they can also point you towards hope if you allow them.' The music needed to capture that feeling of haunting beauty, but also intensity, power, strength, and danger."
Series director J. A. Bayona, who previously directed fantastical adventure films like A Monster Calls and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, also integrated music in his approach to shooting emotional sequences between the characters. Actress Nazanin Boniadi recounted Bayona's specific technique, saying:
"[Bayona] has this technique that he used in my scenes with [Ismael Cruz Córdova], where he would say, ‘Okay, don’t say the dialogue. I’m just going to play some music that’s appropriate for the scene and I just want you to go through the feelings of what the scene would be.’ It was a really powerful experience to be able to experience it without the words and he’d just capture the way you look as you’re going through these emotions. It was a new thing for me. I’ve never experienced that."
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With a high fantasy series like The Rings of Power, of course, come fantastical sets and locations that arguably portray richer histories than most movie sets of modern-day stories. Robert Aramayo, who portrays the Elven leader Elrond, a key character that fans of the films will recognize, went on to sing all the praises for the set decorations and the efforts that went into building the spaces they filmed:
"Celebrimbor’s workshop was this incredible space. It’s amazing what you don’t see; the details that were absolutely thought through until the end. You’d pick something up and it’d be some part of history. Things like that added detail to crafting the scene, especially from my perspective, as to be in Celebrimbor’s workshop for Elrond was an overwhelmingly beautiful thing."
"It just spoke volumes of the passion and the research that everyone had done," Celebrimbor himself Charles Edwards echoed Aramayo's praises. "Everybody working on this project is working at the very top of their game and the passion everybody has for the material is palpable when you’re on a set like that. It’s so beautifully considered and thought through and it really informs what you do as an actor."
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Besides the grand sets and the emotional music, it's also impossible not to think of "large-scale battles" when hearing about Lord of the Rings. We asked the young actor Tyroe Muhafidin, who portrays Theo, an original character in possession of a mysterious sword, about what it was like working on the stunts and crafting a sword-fighting performance against practically real-life Orcs. He said:
"Any stunts that we did do, there were no imaginary enemies, because the beautiful prosthetics and makeup teams had physical Orcs right in front of us. There was no acting needed. I spent a lot of time in the stunt gym. We got to learn all sorts of things about how to fall, how to roll, how to punch, how to block, and how to sell. That was really fun, learning how to make it look like you’re in pain without actually being in pain."
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Finally, who can forget about the heartfelt Lord of the Rings "bro-bestie" moments between Frodo and Sam, Legolas and Gimli, and, sure, even Aragorn and Boromir. In this series, however, we're finally getting a central sisterhood put in the spotlight, between Markella Kavenagh's Nori and Megan Richards' Poppy. On channeling that signature Lord of the Rings "power of friendship" within their characters' bond, Richards said:
"It’s lovely. They got up to a lot of mischief and a lot of adventure, but that is all driven by love and loyalty, especially from Poppy. She remains by Nori’s side throughout thick and thin, and they are the Yin to each other’s Yang. It’s really nice that they are equals."
Sara Zwangobani, who portrays Nori's mother, summed it up best, when she said that this focus on relationships between characters is what makes Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's works stand out in the fantasy genre. She said:
"Yes, there’s the world-building—and in Tolkien’s case, there’s the beautiful language and lyricism—but I still think, thematically, it comes down to the universal themes of the human condition. In Tolkien’s case, he really delves into what it is to be human, what it is to love and have friendship and family, and what it is also to be alone with the struggle of the darkness within oneself and how to navigate that."
Thankfully, we'll have eight episodes spread across multiple weeks to get invested in both the new characters and this somewhat new world of Middle Earth.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is streaming weekly on Prime Video starting on September 2.
UPDATE (August 31, 2022): The article has been updated to reflect the PH release date of the series on September 2nd.
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