The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been going strong for seven episodes now on Amazon Prime Video, but it wasn’t always a sure thing that the series would end up in the house that Jeff Bezos built. As detailed in The Hollywood Reporter, the Tolkien estate entertained other pitches before accepting Jeff’s.
One of the hopefuls was HBO, which basically just wanted to adapt The Lord of the Rings for TV. The Tolkien estate has some problems with Peter Jackson’s beloved Lord of the Rings movies (J.R.R. Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, since deceased, said they “eviscerated” the books), but the estate wasn’t interested in treating the same ground again. Joe and Anthony Russo, the guys behind Marvel’s Infinity Saga, also wanted to do something in the Third Age of Middle-earth, pitched as “an Aragorn story.”
Then there was Netflix, which wanted to give The Lord of the Rings the Marvel treatment with lots of shows, including a Gandalf show and an Aragorn drama. According to one insider, “that completely freaked out the estate.” In the end, the Tolkien estate went with Amazon’s pitch from first-time showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, which was about the little-explored Second Age of Middle-earth. “It was our collective passion and fidelity to Tolkien that really won the day,” said Amazon Studios exec Vernon Sanders. And I’m sure the high bid helped, too.
Who is Sauron on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?
There’s only episode of The Rings of Power season 1 left, which means there’s only one episode left to answer one of the show’s most persistent mysteries: just where is Sauron?
We’ve heard plenty of talk about the most famous baddie in Middle-earth, but haven’t seen him. Per THR, in the Second Age Sauron is able to take on a “fair form,” which suggests that he’s someone we’ve already met.
“It would be very tempting to make the first season of this show The Sauron Show, very villain-centric,” McKay said. “But we wanted that level of evil and complexity of evil to emerge out of a world that you’re invested in — not because evil is threatening it immediately. We wanted you to fall in love again with Middle-earth. We wanted you to understand and relate to the struggles that each of these characters are having before we test them in a way they’ve never been tested before.”
The showrunners are enjoying the fact that people are debating Sauron’s identity, but they’re not about to give anything away. “It’s another Tolkien thing where when a shadow spreads — which is part of what is happening in our show — it affects everyone’s relationships,” Payne said. “Even Frodo and Sam. They’re the best friends in all of Middle-earth, yet they started to mistrust each other because that’s a manifestation of that shadow. So having an audience suspect this person or that person could be Sauron is drawing them into that thing where the shadow is overcoming all of us and making us suspicious of each other.”
The Rings of Power will be “bigger and better” on every level
Whoever Sauron is, expect him to play a more visible role in season 2, which McKay says they’re aiming to make be “bigger and better” on “every level … by an order of magnitude.”
“One of the big things we learned was even when it’s a small scene, it always has to tie back into the larger stakes,” Payne said when asked about lessons from the first season they can apply to the second. “There are things that didn’t work as well in season one that might have worked in a smaller show,” McKay added. “It has to be about good and evil and the fate of the world or it doesn’t have that epic feeling you want when you’re in Tolkien.”
They’ll still have smaller, character-focused moments, of course, but when you have Jeff’s resources, you might as well use them. As for when we’ll see season 2, which started filming earlier this month, McKay expects work to continue on it for “another couple years.”
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels
