Middle-earth’s Second Age was a time of peace…until it wasn’t. According to The Rings of Power‘s showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne that growing darkness will dominate the show’s second season. But what else can we expect from the show’s sophomore outing? That’s what we wanted to know when we spoke with them ahead of the show’s return at Prime Video. From Tom Bombadil and Tolkien lore to finding out the Stranger’s real name and why this season is even more epic, they gave viewers a lot to be excited about as they dive int The Rings of Power season two.
Nerdist: Before we get into season two, I wanted to know, did the reactions to season one, good or bad, influence your approach to season two in any way?
Patrick McKay: Season two was conceived and written before a single frame of season one was seen by anybody, so in this particular instance, while it might be really tempting and easy to try to do a cause effect situation there, no, no. This was always the story. This was the plan from the beginning.
To the extent that season one influenced season two, it’s more our own experience. We like to say making season one was a bit like building a pyramid, before anyone had ever attempted to build a pyramid, including us. In season two, we’re building another pyramid, and that’s drawing on all the experience we have of having done it once before. And hopefully, we’re getting better at our jobs. We want every season and every episode to raise the bar, and if we’re getting better at doing that, then hopefully, some of the fruits of that labor are beginning to show. At the end of the day, we feel like we’re just hitting our stride.
What are the biggest, most obvious differences between season one and two of The Rings of Power?
J.D. Payne: Season one starts in a time of relative peace for Middle-earth. We’re bringing audiences to the Second Age in a time when the shadow had just sort of receded a bit. And we were setting up the chessboard, meeting a bunch of our heroes and one of our villains, in particular. But he was behind a cloak, so to speak, and he was not played open season one.
Season two, Sauron is out in the open. The audience knows who he is, and he’s coming to Celebrimbor in the form of Annatar. So now that the villain is here, really everything is going to be set in motion.
Season one is about the heroes and bringing people to Middle-earth. Season two is all about the villains. Annatar has been ascendant in Mordor. Sauron has left season one with three rings he created, but he was unable to turn Galadriel to his side. He doesn’t have any of the rings. He has no armies. And he has no orcs, no weapons. All he has is his own cunning, and he’s going to use it to set in motion Adar and his armies, Gil-galad and the elves in their armies, and set Middle-earth on a collision course with some pretty disastrous stuff.
Patrick McKay: We very consciously designed season one, as J.D. says, a return to Middle-earth, but one in which you would feel the breadth of the different kinds of peoples, the different characters, the different realms, the different races, all of which are on their own journeys. And then season one, you just started to see some of those journeys converge.
Season two is really all those different journeys, starting more and more, to feel like one epic, and that is the story of Sauron’s rise and all of Middle-earth, despite all their disparate origins and interests, having to come together to face him. But what that also means is along the way, different characters are going to rise and become major protagonists from episode to episode and even season to season. Celebrimbor, played by the amazing Charlie Edwards, has a supporting role in season one.
We lured Charlie Edwards to join our merry band with the promise that in season two, in some ways, Celebrimbor is the emotional heart of the whole season. And in future seasons, I daresay other characters might become more prominent or less prominent. We’re trying to create a rotating cast of heroes and, indeed, villains, and everybody gets their moment to shine. And season two is going to be focused much more on Sauron.
J.D. Payne: And Celebrimbor, because there’s a great psychological thriller between them. There’s this sort of cat-and-mouse game, as Sauron is trying to manipulate Celebrimbor into making the rings. So that’s something that we’re excited for our audiences to experience.
Patrick McKay: But it necessitates a darker tone as well as higher stakes, and not everybody’s going to get out of the season alive.
Oh. I can’t imagine you want to tell me who’s not making it out of alive.
McKay: You got to watch.
I asked you about the most obvious, major differences. What are some of the more subtle differences between these two seasons?
Payne: We’re working with a new production designer this season named Kristian Milsted. He worked on a lot of different shows and films before this, including a bunch of the Watchmen season that was on HBO, which we were great admirers of.
Our goal is always to do as much practically and in-camera as we possibly can. Season two, the on-set builds, the in-camera worlds, are several layers of magnitude richer and larger than anything we attempted in season one. Khazad-dûm, which we’re meeting at a time of great splendor and majesty, season one, in terms of what was actually in-camera, there were a couple of rooms and a bridge. Season two, we built an entire working dwarf mine with various tunnels and passages and unexplored caverns and marketplaces, and a huge throne room, in addition to a bridge and several other rooms. In terms of what we’re actually getting in-camera, it’s much, much, much more this season. And that all, adds to a tonal shift that we were interested in subtly applying.
Patrick McKay: We’re enormously proud of season one, but as J.D. said, that was Middle-earth in a time of peace. Season two, the shadows are creeping in. That means it’s going to be grittier, it’s going to be darker, and our producing director this season is the enormously talented Charlotte Brändström, who recently did an episode of Shogun we’re great admirers of, working with her in the later episodes of season one, we really found a tone that was very heart-on-sleeve emotionally, but also very grounded visually and rich in its performances.
We really wanted to capitalize on that and carry it forward. You feel a shift in the storytelling that’s not always so obvious in terms of just the gravity with which we’re approaching each of these scenes, each of these performances, each of these worlds in their depiction visually, but also hopefully how they play emotionally from scene to scene.
Payne: A not such a subtle difference, I can’t help but mention as I’m looking at your (wedding) ring on the Zoom screen, is now we’ve got rings in play. There’s the three Elven rings. We’re going to see the seven Dwarven rings forged. We’re going to start to see the effects that those have on our characters. The Elven rings have some mysterious qualities of healing, of preserving and protecting, and we’re going to see some of these come out in the drama.
McKay: There’s a new magic in Middle-earth this time.
Oh, and I shall also say new characters and new creatures. We’re going to see Tom Bombadil and we’re going to see Cirdan. We’re also going to see Ents, and we’re going to see Barrow-wights. There’s canon characters and creatures that I think fans are going to be very excited to see, and there’s also a ton for people who have never heard of Middle-earth before to come and enjoy the party.
Okay. You brought him up, so I’m going to jump the gun on asking about him. You are bringing a beloved yet divisive Middle-earth figure to the screen with Tom Bombadil. Why did you decide to include him, and what can you tell us about the role he’ll play this season?
McKay: I’m going to come at this tonally. Season two, as we said, is a darker season by virtue of the fact that Sauron is unleashed. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t still want room for Tolkienian whimsy, wonder, and humor. And in thinking about our storyline, we knew Tom Bombadil was around at this time, and we knew Tom Bombadil had never been brought to the screen in the way that we feel he deserved. Those two ultimately proved irresistible questions that we had to answer, so he’s sort of bringing the light in a season with a lot of shadow.
J.D. Payne: But one of the challenges is that Tom Bombadil sort of defies drama by his very nature. Frodo and the Hobbits go to him, not really to figure out what to do with the ring, not really figure out how to battle Sauron, just kind of to hang out, hear him sing some songs and say some rhymes and tell him about some trees and the old forest and the Barrow-wights. But he’s a powerful character, and he’s a character with deep wells of wisdom. If I can hang out with anyone in Middle-earth, anyone, it would be Tom Bombadil because he just knows everything. He’s been around forever.
The challenge was to find what’s a way you can bring a character like that into the drama in a way that doesn’t stop the story dead, but also doesn’t violate the essential nature of who Tom Bombadil is. We sort of tried to walk that line, and we think audiences here are going to enjoy it.
He’s such an important part of the lore, and I do want to ask you a couple of questions about that, but I don’t think everyone realizes just how many years of story this show has to condense for obvious reasons. What omission of Tolkien’s lore are you most upset you had to leave out this year?
Patrick McKay: I don’t know that we ever feel upset about our ability to play in this world. It is just such a constant source of joy and magic and wonder. What we end up feeling is gratitude for the enormous banquet that Tolkien is serve. And then to be able to every season pick a few things and fill a plate is an opportunity more than anything that would upset us.
J.D. Payne: I’ll take a nibble at the question, in as much as one of the things that is interesting about Tolkien on a literary sense, is just the sense of almost the geological timescale on which things happen in Middle-earth.
The rings are forged and then hundreds of years pass where nothing happens, and you just sort of have a shadow brewing. Or the rings are just sort of working on people. And you also have generations passing in Númenor as things are slowly, slowly, slowly getting worse. And that works in literature. It’s next to impossible to accomplish in a dramatic, especially televised or filmed dramatic dramatization.
So you lose some of those, but what you lose in that you gain in cohesion of narrative-
McKay: And emotional impact.
Payne: And emotional impact, by giving people characters they’re able to invest in. Instead of human characters dying every season and then having to meet new humans while you’re sort hanging out with these immortal elves, you get to really invest in your human characters and be with them for the entire series.
McKay: We love this material so much, and we’re always looking to bring it to the screen in the grandest way imaginable that is true to the spirit of the source, and that’s something that we’re never going to be satisfied that we’ve fully pulled off.
We’ve only got a couple of minutes left, so I’m going to go kind of rapid-fire here. What part of Tolkien and lore are you most excited for viewers to see this year?
Payne: Sauron, Celebrimbor, and Eregion.
McKay: The forging of the rings of power in Eregion.
You already mentioned Annatar. We see a very different version of Sauron at the start of the season. Can you tell us if there are other versions of Sauron that are going to appear?
McKay: It’s an evolution. Sauron appears in many forms, and over the course of season two there’s quite a growth and change in his chameleonic nature. But it’s not whack-a-mole with different Saurons popping up all over the place. It’s all the development of the character as his relationships inevitably erode from his inherent evil.
The first few episodes tease it. So I have to ask, I know you’re not going to tell me who the Stranger is, but will we find out who The Stranger is by the end of this season?
Payne: Definitive yes.
I think we should also say that that’s not why you should go on the Stranger’s journey this season. We like to say that he’s someone who’s come to Middle-earth; he’s learning his purpose. He knows he’s a wizard now, but he doesn’t really know what it means to be a wizard, and what does it mean to have these powers? What are my powers? How do I control my powers? What am I supposed to use them for? Who do I fight? How do I fight them? What impact is that going to have on my friends? What impact is it going to have on me? All those are the questions he’s asking on the journey’s going on as he comes into his own. So that’s the ice cream sundae. The name is just the cherry on top.
So when we finally learn his name is Mithrandir, will you come back and talk to me again after the season?
McKay: No comment. But yes, we will come back and talk to you.