‘The Rings of Power’ Creators Break Down That 20-Minute Sauron Cold Open

[This interview contains spoilers for the first episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two.]

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The Rings of Power returned for its second season on Thursday and opened with a 20-minute cold open sequence filling in Sauron’s journey from the First Age into the Second Age. Now, the show’s creators are lending some insight into the sequence (and why one apparent change was made from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books).

The sequence saw Sauron — played by Jack Lowden at first — as he was betrayed and brutally “crowned” by Orc leader Adar (Sam Hazeldine). Sauron’s physical form was destroyed, and fans saw how The Dark Lord spent many, many years slowly recovering before being able to retake human form (now played, once again, by Charlie Vickers). After joining a group of men sailing away from Middle-earth, their ship is attacked by a sea creature and Sauron/Halbrand meets up with Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) on the high seas — bringing his story full circle to the opening of season one.

Below, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay answer some questions about the ambitious sequence.

So what made doing this backstory appealing, and how long was this sequence — like, how many years did it take Sauron to regain his physical form?

J.D. PAYNE So this was originally a sequence that we talked about doing in season one. We talked about it being the cold open to episode six when Adar and Halbrand meet. We were going to give you this big backstory, and then we were like: This is going to end up feeling jammed in. We didn’t feel like we had the space to do it in the terms we envisioned it. We got to talking and said, “What about moving it to the top of season two?” Because it felt like an integral part of the story and as soon as we put it in season two, it liberated us to tell it the way it felt like it needed to be told, and it helped us by showing this animus between Sauron and Adar that would help charge the season going forward.

PATRICK MCKAY Also, it’s your chance to spend some time with Sauron. In the story in his head, he’s the hero. He thinks he knows better than everybody. He’s going to fix the world. “If everybody did the things the way I think they should be done, then everything will be great and we’d have peace.” Well, how do you come to that point of view? How would he come to that level of arrogance that he knows better than anyone in the world? And the answer is go on this journey with him and see how has he been betrayed, how has he suffered, how he sees himself as a visionary, and what is he grappling with. We love the idea that by the end of that 20 minutes, you might rewatch season one in your head and have a whole new lens on what he was going through at each of those [story] turns.

PAYNE You asked about timeline. Going back to the legendarium [Tolkien’s cumulative works], we almost felt like there was this delicious hole that Tolkien had left or ellipses. He talks about Sauron in the First Age as Morgoth’s lieutenant, and then he sort of shows up hundreds of years into the Second Age, kind of out of nowhere, and there’s really no indication in the legendarium exactly what he was doing. There was a lot left unspecified. So we felt like it was an enormous opportunity to take you on an emotional journey with Sauron and help you feel that — for potentially hundreds of years — he had been this creature. There’s this one dissolve where you see the stalagmites have grown, you’re supposed to get to the sense that a geological amount of time has passed which Sauron spent at the bottom of the world.

Does Sauron feel physical pain? I was surprised he didn’t cry out when the crown thing happened, but there are other times later when he’s being beaten by Adar’s men when he does — I wasn’t sure if he’s just pretending to feel pain when playing in human form.

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MCKAY So the rules operating and governing his powers, his abilities: We know he can’t be killed by any normal means. He can return — Tolkien writes about that a lot. But also beings of his class do feel pain. They are subject to the limitations of a mortal body. So he definitely feels pain. He seems to express guilt and regret, but whether those are altruistic in nature, or whether those are all about his own self-image and his own grandiosity, I think there’s a really delicious ambiguity about it.

Got it. So did Sauron cause the sea monster to attack the ship in order to meet up with Galadriel? Or was that random?

MCKAY This is a question about the cosmology of Tolkien’s universe and the show. I think one could make a very strong case that the Gods caused the sea monster to attack for him. But, we’re not privy to the intentions of the Gods. We only see what happens and comment, “Gosh, maybe that’s what’s going on.”

PAYNE We talk a lot in the writers room about whether Sauron is a puppet master or if he’s an opportunist. We’re constantly balancing those two and finding out where something just broke his way, and he took advantage of it, and where he was 17 steps ahead of everyone setting up the dominos beforehand. We like to leave some of those things to the audience to be able to have fun talking about and not give our own authorial opinions about exactly how Sauron did it.

One more question from the premiere. In the books, Círdan the Shipwright was simply gifted his ring by Celebrimbor. But it’s arguably more interesting to have what you did with Celebrimbor making the rings, Elrond running off with them, giving them to Círdan to destroy, Círdan thinks about throwing it into the abyss, then changes his mind. Can you talk about making that tweak?

PAYNE When you’re in the Third Age, you have almost every day, to a certain extent, spelled out — like what Frodo had for breakfast, and what time he left this place, and where they slept that night. In the Second Age, sometimes it’s just “so-and-so ends up with the ring.” For mega fans, they know where the story is going, but we often like to say that one of the delights of working on the Second Age is knowing where something is going but not knowing how we’re going to get there. If we were telling Titanic — spoiler — the ship is going to sink. But exactly when it hits the iceberg, who’s in love with who, who dies and how they die — that’s all the fun of how you get there. So with some of these things, similarly, when you’re dealing with how someone gets a ring, the fact that it might have bounced between a couple of people before it ended up in the historical record is all part of that same fun.

The first three episodes of The Rings of Power season two are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes will drop every Thursday until the season finale on Oct. 3.

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