First Look at Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Reveals Characters Familiar and New
The billion dollar prequel series arrives this fall
Welcome to the Second Age. We’re finally in the same calendar year as the premiere of Amazon’s long-awaited Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, and Vanity Fair has provided the first look at the characters rounding out the show, including Robert Aramayo’s Elrond, Joseph Mawle‘s Oren, Markella Kavenagh’s Tyra, Robert Aramayo’s Beldor, and Morfydd Clark‘s Galadriel. Check out some pictures below.
Led by showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, The Rings of Power takes place thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings films and “unites all the major stories of Middle-earth’s Second Age: the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.”
All of this is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumously published The Silmarillion, which lays out the pre-rings history of Middle-earth. As McKay puts it to Vanity Fair, the question was, “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?” That mega-event arrives in the form of a historic, billion dollar deal between Amazon, Tolkien’s estate, publisher HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema.
Amazon has committed to making five 10-episode seasons of the prequel series, and the first two have already been ordered. While we can probably expect a revolving door of high-profile directors throughout the costly show’s run, J.A. Bayona is set to direct the series’ first two episodes. In order to translate Tolkien’s incredibly detailed Middle-earth history into 50 hours of television, McKay and Payne had compress centuries of story into one time period. “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,” said Payne. “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.”
That means we’ll get to see the rise of Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving in the LotR movies and Aramayo here), the origins of Isildur (Maxim Baldry here, but played by Harry Sinclair in the films when we see him cut the ring from Sauron’s hand), and the great halls of Khazad-dûm (where Gandalf would bellow, “You shall not pass!”) in all their glory.
We’ll also be shown the first multi-racial residents of Middle-earth. Ismael Cruz Córdova portrays the first elf of color in an onscreen Tolkien production, Arondir; he’s in love with a human villager named Bronwyn, played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British-Iranian actor. Then there’s Disa, a dwarven princess played by Sophia Nomvete and the first female or Black dwarf in a Tolkien project. In a more prominent takeaway from The Silmarillion, we’ll meet the forbearers of the hobbits. “One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age,” McKay said. “But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?”
The Rings of Power will introduce harfoots, a race that eventually would evolve into hobbits. These characters live in a pastoral society “that thrives on secrecy and evading detection,” allowing the show runners to craft “a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead story in the margins of the bigger quests. Two lovable, curious harfoots, played by Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh, encounter a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres Friday, September 2nd on Prime Video, with new episodes available weekly.
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