There are orcs, or should we say Uruk, in every corner of The Rings of Power season three’s set when we come for a visit. There are orcs wandering across the various sets. There are orcs having lunch. There are orcs drinking coffee. Orcs taking naps. Literally so many orcs in the wild. And as a consummate orc-lover and proud member of Uruk nation, it’s needless to say I was absolutely thrilled to see them all. Up close and personal, these orcs looked AMAZING; you couldn’t get past how otherworldly they seemed. (Complimentary!!) Truly, the orctors (orc actors) of The Rings of Power season three were perfectly transformed. And so, when Movement Director Tallulah Holly-Massey offered to teach me how to walk like an orc, naturally I was 100% in. And you know what, learning how to walk like an orc gives you more insight than you can imagine into the Uruk nature. Join me for a deep dive into orc movement, the intense orc feelings it engenders, and everything else orcish I learned on the set of The Rings of Power season three. (Including how to create your orc name, insights from the showrunners on Adar’s legacy, and sentiments from two orctors in love.)
“First and foremost, I think it’s trying to have realism,” Holly-Massey tells me about crafting orc movement on The Rings of Power season three, “which sounds weird because it’s fantasy, but I want them to look at home in their bodies, and that can’t just be how they stand. It has to be what they’re thinking about, what drives them, where they move from.” All deeply important points and ideas I personally spend a lot of time thinking about when it comes to the Uruk orcs.
When I ask Holly-Massey what her answers to those questions are for The Rings of Power‘s orcs, she dives deep: “I mean, I quite like the story, the version that’s like they were elves that were captured. I mean, they’ve still got the ears. So at first, I was thinking about training orcs as elves and then kind of crushing them, poisoning them.” And, indeed, in The Rings of Power, as we’ve spoken about with Adar at great lengths, but is true of all Uruk/orcs—the orcs ARE elves who have been essentially crushed. Creatures who have been tortured and poisoned into new, tormented shapes by the inescapable darkness around them. So it makes sense that their movements should reflect this.
All of that distills into the following rules for walking like an orc/Uruk. Holly-Massey shares, “The rules for orcs are basically this. First, nothing in their body can straighten. So they’re completely muscle-bound, even ideally their fingertips. They could straighten an arm, but it would be like a bat, where it would kind of recoil immediately. Second, an orc’s butt should never be out. I don’t want them to look like T-Rexes or apes. So I try and get them to drop their butt and be quite heavy. Then I want them to have bent legs and some kind of spinal twist. And then ideally they stay in that shape through every motion.”
Holly-Massey demonstrates for me, and the movement itself looks like a bit of a hop, or what she terms “an uneven gait.” And then she invites me to think about an orc’s movements on The Rings of Power in the following way: “When I move, I think about what time is to the character, what someone’s clock is, if that makes sense. So if an elf’s clock is thousands and thousands of years that they’ve been alive, it’s like they might be standing there for an hour, but for them it just feels like nothing. An orc’s clock I think is quite an uneven kind of unpredictable tempo. Erratic.” So when an orc moves, their time distorts, and their movement does too.
Additionally, Holly-Massey adds, “I feel like they also can’t see that well, especially in season one, because they’re underground and they’ve been underground mostly. Some of them have been born underground. And they’ve had no home, only these tunnels, which make them contract.”
I agree with these sentiments, and ask if she thinks that this contraction and the way the Uruk/orcs are muscle-bound and unable to straighten has become biological, or if it’s more of a setting-based choice. She considers and shares, “I think that it’s from being cramped in that underground world and because they were poisoned or sunburnt. I imagine they’re sort of made of scar tissue or something at this point. I think about it as if something got broken and couldn’t heal right. Or multiple things, at this point, have healed wrong. It’s painful to stretch.”
And that makes me wonder whether orcs are always in pain in The Rings of Power‘s world. Holly-Massey offers that she thinks so: “But they’re just used to the pain. They normalize it.” She notes, “They don’t even really feel it anymore because it’s such a part of them.” Okay, just stab me in my Uruk Nation-loving heart, why don’t you? I dare any Rings of Power fan not to empathize with the orcs, even just a little bit, after reading this.
Holly-Massey muses further, “What else do I think about? I think they’re looking for community. They don’t really like being alone, and they’re driven by very basic things like food, a roof over their head. It sounds so cheesy, but they just want a home.”
I share that I don’t think it sounds cheesy at all. It’s been very hard for the orcs because no race will accept them, and no one will allow them to live in any kind of peace, even if they wanted to. Only Adar tried to find a home for them that met all their needs so they could live a good life. But Sauron put an end to the Uruk being “children,” and though they can perhaps still live better in Mordor than any other place in Middle-earth, their poisoning by evil has resumed again.
Holly-Massey’s visions of how orc movement developed really highlight the idea that lacking a proper place to exist, a true home, shifted the orcs’ entire biological development, literally contorting and twisting them into the shapes they now inhabit. And, in some fashion, it’s not so hard to believe that a creature always in pain would seek to lash out against everything else in its existence.
The Rings of Power‘s Movement Coach concludes, “I was talking about it in another conversation, and I said, ‘It’s like if you took a can and crushed it,’ that crumpling.” My poor orc children.
With all these notes in mind, it’s time to demonstrate my own orc walk for Holly-Massey. Thankfully, there’s no recording allowed on set. But I’ll paint you a picture. She offers me the following instructions as I stand in the middle of Khazad-dûm’s silent set, Durin’s empty throne judging me, contorting my body into the shape of an orc… (I joke it’s foreshadowing into the Third Age, to be an orc in Khazad-dûm, because I am a nerd.): “Feet not too narrow and not too turned out. Kind of a little bit bow-legged is quite ideal. Heavy butt. And then tension in your body, some kind of twist. Maybe you’re holding a weapon. Maybe your arm doesn’t work at all, and it’s kind of stuck in, all the way into your body. And then take that shape for a little stagger.”
Just kidding, of course I have a video for you!
As we laugh at my attempts, I learn that Holly-Massey actually holds “Orc Bootcamps” to teach the orc legions how to walk before their filming on The Rings of Power commences. She reveals that at Orc Bootcamp, they play a game to learn their Rings of Power Orc name, then introduce themselves to one another with it. “Some of them get really into it,” She chuckles.
But how does one find their Orc name? Simple. It’s “The first three letters of your first street with the first two letters of your surname. And then if it doesn’t sound orcy enough, you can add in a Q or an X or something.” My orc name is “Upprusq.” And I hope you share yours with me ASAP.
As we wrap up one of the most fascinating discussions I’ve ever had about any series, I can’t help but ask Holly-Massey about Adar. She notes that she talked with Sam Hazeldine a little bit in the previous season about the idea that “he was not completely an elf. Adar was a bit heavier than an elf. If you talk about elements, an elf’s quite airy. Númenóreans are watery; dwarves are like stone. I think Adar was a bit heavier, a little heavier than the air, maybe like infused with iron or rust.” She offers that she liked the idea of being bound by scar tissue and in constant pain for Adar as well, and I can only agree.
Speaking of Adar, when I chat with showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay on set, I wonder whether the idea of the orcs being Uruk died with Adar, or whether season three picks up on that at all. McKay assures me, “It did not die with him, actually. We’re doing a whole new thing this time that’s really, really going to be exciting. There’s a new orc character who I think people are really going to respond to. There’s something really cool happening there.”
Meanwhile Payne notes, “We’re very consciously going to pick that thread up, that not all the orcs and Uruk are happy to be under the control of their new master Sauron. In fact, some of them see Sauron as an existential threat to the entire Uruk race and still have Adar’s dreams for a free orc nation really deep in their hearts. And so one of those characters in particular, Marnûkh, is going to be one that we are going to be following over the course of the season. We talked about an orc with an arc last season. I think we’re going to go even deeper with that, where an orc proves to be truly three-dimensional and who part of you doesn’t trust because they’re an orc, and you have an inherent distrust in them, but part of you can laugh with and smile at and really kind of fall in love with.”
And after all of these new orc insights, how can we not all fall in love with Uruk nation? As I observe the set between specific activities, I fall into conversation with two orctors waiting for their scenes to resume. John and Kat play a couple of orcs and are also a married couple. I ask them what it’s like to be two orcs in love, and they tell me, “When we are in character, we keep saying little things like… The fell beasts; you’d take them out for romantic walks together. But you got to be careful because they bite and everything.”
Orcs, they love romantic walks with dangerous creatures, just like everyone else.
To see the ultimate fate of the orcs and Uruk nation, we’ll all have to tune in when The Rings of Power season three releases on November 11.