Before any of the first season of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” had streamed on Amazon Prime Video in 2022, executive producers and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay had already finished much of their work constructing the story for Season 2. That’s partly due to the free time provided by the COVID shutdown in 2020. But, in truth, Payne and McKay say they’ve known for years how the show will recount the rise of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) through the Second Age of Middle-earth, the millennia-spanning era leading to the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels.
“It’s surprisingly more mapped out than you would expect,” McKay says.
Season 2 opens, for example, with a sequence the writers first conceived six years ago: the depiction of what McKay calls “the show-canon origin story” for Sauron, a geeky way of acknowledging that many details about the Second Age, unwritten by Tolkien, had to be invented for the series. It’s a necessity that has nonetheless frustrated some Tolkien devotees, who have not been shy about vocalizing their displeasure — with the liberties taken with Middle-earth lore and the deliberative pace of the storytelling.
Despite that criticism, Payne, McKay and executive producer Lindsey Weber remain steadfast in their commitment to their plans for the series. “It’s so tempting to find a narrative in why, you know, certain things in Season 2 feel different,” McKay says. “It was really just the plan.”
That doesn’t mean they can’t be at least a little flexible. “If you’re going do a road trip from San Diego to New York, you know the major cities along the highway,” Payne says. “But then you also see, as you’re driving, like, ‘Oh, there’s a cool monument that I read about on the internet.’ We give ourselves that latitude.”
Much of Season 2, which premieres on Aug. 29, will be spent portraying Sauron’s work forging those titular rings and how their wicked nature invites an encroaching darkness into Middle-earth — an outline familiar to even casual “Lord of the Rings” fans. The series, however, will also venture into literal uncharted territory east of Sauron’s domain of Mordor, a barren wilderness called Rhûn where the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) — a wizard who may or may not be an early version of Gandalf — travels with his Harfoot companion, Nori (Markella Kavenagh), to find his purpose.
“One of the things we always look for is putting things on screen that are in Middle-earth that you’ve never seen on screen before,” McKay says. “Tortured rock forms in a barren expanse felt like fresh imagery to us.”
Adds Payne, “Originally, it was a green, lush paradise, but through dark forces and unsavory interventions, it has become the wasteland that you see in the show.”
One of those dark forces are what McKay calls “a biker gang on horses” that pursue the Stranger and Nori through Rhûn on behalf of an evil wizard played by Ciarán Hinds (“Game of Thrones”), but creating their look proved vexing.
“We worked endlessly on designs for these guys because we wanted it to be bizarre and otherworldly,” McKay says. “We had a lot of promising leads, but it was a lot of iteration and going in circles, and then we ran out of time.” It wasn’t until post-production that visual effects supervisor Jason Smith suggested covering all of the horsemen’s faces with computer-generated masks.
“Every single one of those masks is a digital effect,” McKay says.
“And it gives us a mystery there that we’re going to come back to,” adds Weber.
“Very much so,” McKay says. “Why did they wear the masks?”
The Rhûn scenes were shot on the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, which McKay says “struck us as suitably weird” for a region almost entirely unknown to Tolkien fans. Otherwise, the rest of Season 2 was shot in and around London, where the production relocated after filming Season 1 in New Zealand (where Peter Jackson made his “Rings” and “Hobbit” films).
Exteriors were largely shot in Windsor Great Park outside of the city, including the sequences involving Weber’s favorite creatures, the tree-like Ents voiced by Olivia Williams and Jim Broadbent. “We filmed it in four or five days of delightful English weather in which it was either exactly zero or minus one,” Weber says with a chuckle. “It was constantly tipping between rain and snow. People were absolutely freezing in the woods at night with these giant metal poles with like a blinky light on the end.”
The move to London “gave us a chance to kind of reboot the way we build the show,” McKay says, but it also was not their choice.
“It’s an Amazon decision,” Weber says. “When you’re a producer, you go where they tell you.”
Vernon Sanders, head of U.S. and global TV for Amazon MGM Studios, says the relocation was “the best creative place for us to be able to build a vision of the show going not just one season, but four or five seasons.”
“It just made more business sense for us, to be completely honest,” he adds.
A great deal of ink has been spilled over Amazon’s monumental investment in “The Rings of Power,” between the roughly $100 million to $150 million doled out per season over 50 hours of television and the $200 million spent on the rights for the series in 2017 (which studio insiders now insist is closer to the actual price tag, not the $250 million originally reported). That kind of spending, a vestige of the golden age of streaming, is out of step in the new period of contraction. But Sanders says the company remains “really behind the show,” and he expects that it will continue to “drive people through all of the avenues of Amazon,” including retail and music. “We’re looking to bring people to the service and we’re hoping to get lots of signups again.” (Sanders won’t confirm, however, whether Amazon will be releasing viewership data like the studio did for “Fallout” and the most recent season of “The Boys”: “We’ll definitely be sharing if there are things that feel like they really stand out,” he says.)
As for McKay and Payne, they have no contingency plans should Amazon wind up having to cut short their fabled road trip through Middle-earth.
“We’re not anticipating that,” McKay says. “We’re making our show and going all the way.”
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