The years-long quest of fans for footage from the Amazon television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will soon cross a crucial battlefield, one that’s not located at Helm’s Deep, the Pelennor Fields or the Black Gate. Rather, the battle will commence amidst the annual cauldron of commercialism incrementally jammed in-between Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI. While the show’s bloated budget (upwards of $1 billion) would justify an exorbitant ad spot, the first trailer will actually arrive online on the day of the Big Game. However, it seems that crucial context for the imminently arriving clip has been officially unleashed, revealing long-obfuscated plot and character details.
From the moment of their appointment a few years back, it was always clear that showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKaye faced a daunting task with their particular adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythos. After all, director Peter Jackson’s cinematic trilogies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit effectively covered the author’s primary works. Consequently, The Rings of Power was always destined to manifest with a narrative cobbled together from Tolkien’s tangential stories, be it from the Middle-earth historical chronicles of The Return of the King’s post-novel appendices, and posthumous works edited by his son, Christopher, such as 1977’s The Silmarillion and 1980’s Unfinished Tales, all of which require significant script-writing liberties for any kind of adaptation attempt. Indeed, a lengthy, revelatory piece from Vanity Fair teases the extent of the show’s evolution of Tolkien’s work.
You can check out some of the tweeted official images scattered below.
Interestingly enough, fans of Tolkien’s supplemental world-building works might get rubbed the wrong way when it comes to how The Rings of Powers treats the traditional timeline, which will see significant alterations to the chronology of certain events, which the author originally envisioned as having taken place over centuries. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “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. 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.”
Regardless, Rings of Power‘s immense ensemble has been fully assembled for a few years now, notwithstanding the exit of Will Poulter and Tom Budge. While the casting of Morfydd Clark, the breakout star from the 2019 psychological dark drama Saint Maud, was treated as significant enough to let it be known that she is playing Galadriel (Cate Blanchett’s magic-wielding ancient elven Lady from the movies), the characters assigned to the rest of the cast remained a tight-kept secret. Now, that practice is starting to come to an end, thanks to a handful of crucial character reveals. Intriguingly, it is said that the characters will exist in a very different Middle-earth as the show aims to “explore that kingdom when it was still full of light, food, and music.”
Clark’s Galadriel will, as expected, serve as a prominent part of The Rings of Power, specifically one that will see her on a maritime adventure, even donning armor. While the character was already thousands of years old during the show’s setting, during the Second Age of the world, she’s still thousands of years younger than Blanchett’s wise, mystical, gifts-bestowing version from the Third-Age-era main stories. Indeed, she is described as “angry and brash as she is clever, and certain that evil is looming closer than anyone realizes.” Galadriel’s adventure will pit her opposite a human named Halbrand, an entirely original character who will be played by Charlie Vickers. It is being teased that the destinies of the unlikely pair become “entwined” in a tale of survival, sharing a raft set on the stormy Sundering Seas.
Robert Aramayo is playing high elf Elrond, another familiar character from the films, in which he was famously played by Hugo Weaving. While the Elrond we know from the Third-Age-set main story is the lord of Rivendell, father of Arwen, and a healer with a magic touch, he hardly seems to be any of those things during the show’s Second Age, thousands of years earlier. New details from the piece reveal that Aramayo’s Elrond will be the center of his own separate storyline, in which he will manifest as “a canny young elven architect and politician” whose arc will see him “rise to prominence in the mystical capital of Lindon.” With Aramayo having replaced Will Poulter, the original intent of the casting is now clear as well. A tweet from the publication elaborates on the biography, describing Elrond as “the elven statesman who is just beginning to build his reputation—starting with mending the relationship between his people and the dwarves of Khazad-dûm.”
Charles Edwards is playing Celebrimbor, an elven smith who hails from royal stock. Despite not being mentioned in the movies, his role in Tolkien’s Rings mythos is quite crucial since he happens to be the very smith who is tasked to create the eponymous rings of power by a deceitful Sauron, who, during this period, presented himself in the beneficent guise of Annatar the “Lord of Gifts.” In this case, the gift was the art of magic ring-crafting, which was promised to unite the kingdoms of Middle-earth into an era of unprecedented peace. Of course, seeing as Sauron secretly crafted the One Ring to control the Rings of Power, we already know about the millennia of wars and disasters that would come about from the endeavor.
Maxim Baldry is playing Isildur, another familiar and crucial character to the traditional Rings story. We saw the character briefly in The Fellowship of the Ring’s celebrated prologue, in which he was played by Harry Sinclair, whose rendition showcased the end of the character’s arc, during which he was the prince and eventual king of the newfound kingdom of Men known as Gondor. During the Second Age’s climactic Battle of the Last Alliance, Isildur cut the One Ring from the finger of a monstrously transformed Sauron; an act that achieved a long-lasting victory. Unfortunately, he ignored the advice of Elrond and kept the Ring for himself, setting up a tragedy that would leave Gondor without a regal presence for an entire age. However, Baldry’s Isildur arrives during a much-earlier time from that fate, and will be the center of his own storyline, described simply as a “sailor,” showcasing his exploits “years before” his soul-corrupting tragedy with the One Ring.
As mentioned, The Rings of Power is also set to showcase original characters and stories that, while clearly inspired by Tolkien’s ethos, will unprecedentedly shift the spotlight to actors of color; a phenomenon that could be explained by the notion of Middle-earth being just one of several continents on the world Arda. Indeed, in a development that might seem surreal, the show’s version of Middle-earth will be populated by elves, dwarves and yes, even hobbits, all of color.
“It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” explains Lindsey Weber, executive producer. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”
Accordingly, Puerto Rican actor Ismael Cruz Córdova and Iranian-English actress Nazanin Boniadi will serve as a couple at the center of a storyline showcasing a forbidden romance. Córdova will play Arondir, who is described as a silvan elf, who becomes romantically involved with Boniadi’s Bronwyn, a humble human healer from a village. Sir Lenny Henry, an English actor of Jamaican descent, is playing an unnamed character described as a “harfoot elder.” The delineation, while vague, indicates that the character is a hobbit, specifically a Harfoot, one of the diminutive race’s three breeds, which also consist of the Stoors and Fallohides. Additionally, newcomer Sophia Nomvete will play Disa, a dwarven princess and the first black female character in the franchise’s live-action history. Her performance is described as being “a scene-stealing role.” She joins another major dwarf character confirmed for the series, Prince Durin IV of Khazad-dûm, who will be played by Owain Arthur.
Finally, there’s some information about the evil elephant in the Middle-earth room, Sauron. While the Lord of Mordor has long been expected to manifest on the series physically as an actual character, rather than a flaming eye atop a sinister tower, no actor has been revealed for such a role as of yet. However, his ominous presence will be perpetual across the show’s various storylines. According to Spanish-born director J.A. Bayona, who helmed the pilot, “We had a dictatorship for 40 years, so you notice the repercussions of war and the shadow of the past. I think this is all about the repercussions of war. There is an idea that feels very faithful to Tolkien, which is intuition. Galadriel has an intuition that things are not fixed, and there is still something lurking.” Appropriately enough, Bayona even confirms that “Shadow of the Past” will be the title of said pilot.
While there’s a lot of information to digest from this array of reveals, it would be unproductive to dive too far down a speculative rabbit hole, with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power trailer set to premiere on Sunday, February 13. Moreover, there’s still a LONG way to go until the series ultimately unleashes its premiere episode, “Shadow of the Past,” on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, September 2.
