Before any of the first season of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” aired on Amazon Prime Video in 2022, executive producers and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay had already finished much of their story-building work for Season 2. That was due in part to the free time afforded by the COVID shutdowns of 2020. But in truth, Payne and McKay say they’ve known for years how the show would tell the rise of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) during the Second Age of Middle-earth, the millennia-long era that led to the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” novels.
“It's amazing how much more elaborate it was than you would expect,” Mackay says.
For example, the second season opens with a sequence the writers first conceived six years ago: a depiction of what McKay calls the “series origin story” of Sauron, a curious way of acknowledging that many details about the Second Age, which Tolkien did not write, had to be invented for the series. It’s a necessity that has nonetheless frustrated some Tolkienists, who haven’t been shy about expressing their displeasure—both with the liberties taken with Middle-earth’s lore and with the deliberate pace of the storytelling.
Despite the criticism, Payne, McKay and executive producer Lindsay Weber have remained steadfast in their plans for the series. “It’s very tempting to find a narrative for why we felt certain things were different in Season 2,” McKay says. “It was really just a plan.”
But that doesn’t mean they can’t be at least a little flexible. “If you’re going to take a road trip from San Diego to New York, you know the major cities along the highway,” Payne says. “But you also see as you drive, like, ‘Oh, there’s this cool monument I read about on the internet.’ We give ourselves that leeway.”
Much of Season 2, which premieres on August 29, will be devoted to Sauron’s work in forging the eponymous Rings and how their evil nature invites darkness into Middle-earth — details that will be familiar even to casual “Lord of the Rings” fans. However, the series will also delve into a literal unknown land east of Sauron’s kingdom of Mordor, a barren wilderness called Rhûn, where the Stranger (Daniel Wyman) — a wizard who may or may not be an early version of Gandalf — travels with his companion, Harfoot, Nori (Marcella Cavenagh), to find his purpose.
“One of the things we always look for is to put things on screen in Middle-earth that you haven’t seen on screen before,” says MacKay. “The tortured rock forms in a barren space felt like new images to us.”
“Originally, it was a lush green paradise, but through dark forces and nefarious interference, it became the barren land you see in the show,” Payne adds.
Among those dark forces is what MacKay calls a “biker gang on horses” who pursue the stranger and Nori across the rune on behalf of an evil wizard played by Ciarán Hinds (“Game of Thrones”), but creating their appearance proves to be troublesome.
“We worked endlessly on designs for these guys because we wanted them to be weird and supernatural,” says McKay. “We had a lot of promising leads, but it was just a lot of iteration and going around in circles, and then we ran out of time.” It wasn’t until post-production that visual effects supervisor Jason Smith suggested covering all the knights’ faces with computer-generated masks.
“Every single one of those masks is a digital effect,” says Mackay.
“This gives us a puzzle that we will return to,” Weber adds.
“Yes, of course,” says MacKay. “Why did they wear masks?”
Ron's scenes were filmed in the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, which McKay said was “suitably surprising” for a region completely unknown to Tolkien fans. Otherwise, the rest of the second season was filmed in and around London, with production moving to New Zealand (where Peter Jackson made his Rings and Hobbit films) after the first season.
Most of the exterior scenes were shot in Windsor Great Park outside the city, including scenes involving Weber’s favorite creatures, the tree-like Ents, voiced by Olivia Williams and Jim Broadbent. “We shot the film in four or five days of great English weather where it was either zero or minus one,” Weber laughs. “It was constantly oscillating between rain and snow. People were freezing in the woods at night because of these giant metal poles with flashing lights on the end of them.”
“Moving to London gave us an opportunity to reboot the way we build the show,” says Mackay, but it wasn’t their choice either.
“It’s a decision that Amazon made,” Weber says. “When you’re a product, you go where they tell you to go.”
Vernon Sanders, president of U.S. and international television at Amazon MGM Studios, says the move was “the best creative place for us to be able to build a vision for the show for not just one season, but four or five seasons.”
“It made more business sense for us, to be perfectly honest,” he adds.
Much ink has been spilled about Amazon’s massive investment in “Rings of Power,” between the roughly $100 million to $150 million it spent per season of 50 hours of television and the $200 million it spent on the rights to the series in 2017 (which studio insiders now insist was closer to the actual price tag, not the $250 million originally reported). That kind of spending, a relic of the golden age of streaming, is out of step with the new downturn. But Sanders says the company is still “really behind the curve,” and expects to continue to “drive people through all of Amazon’s avenues,” including retail and music. “We’re looking forward to bringing people to the service and hopefully getting a lot of signups again.” (Sanders wouldn’t confirm whether Amazon will release viewership data like the studio did for “Fallout” and the final season of “The Boys”: “We’ll certainly share if there are things that we feel really stand out,” he says.)
As for McKay and Payne, they have no contingency plans in case the Amazons eventually have to cut their legendary overland journey across Middle-earth short.
“We don't expect that, we make our show and we go all the way to the end,” Mackay says.
