By Amazon is set to premiere the second season of its lavish fantasy series “The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power” this Fall, and with it will come Sauron sporting a whole new elvish look.
The first season ended with Charlie Vickers’ human Halbrand revealed to be Sauron in disguise and whose manipulations led to the awakening of Mount Doom. It also saw the creation of the three elvish rings forged by Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards).
Trailers for the new season have shown off Vickers appearing in some scenes as a blond-haired elf named Annatar, but the reasoning for why he’s doing it isn’t clear.
Speaking with Empire, Vickers says it’s essentially a new guise allowing him to manipulate Celebrimbor into forging the other rings:
“You have Sauron and Celebrimbor working together, making rings. Everything Sauron does is to serve other people, to appeal to someone else. In the same way the whole Halbrand thing was for Galadriel, this new look is for Celebrimbor. This is the best way to get him to do what he wants him to do: make a bunch of rings that’ll dominate everyone else.
Co-showrunner Patrick McKay says the main draw of the series and doing this story at this point in the timeline is to show off the forging of Sauron into a villain, especially as we are now in on things in a way characters on screen aren’t:
“The opportunity now with Season 2 is: the audience is in on the con. We know who he is. We have a pretty good sense of what he wants. The fun is watching other people get ensnared in the web.
As the season unfolds, the plan starts. One hammer after another starts to fall until, by the last couple of episodes, you realise the level and extent of how evil he is and how deeply he’s strategised this whole thing out.”
Part of that will result in the various sprawling threads involving the men, Elves, Dwarves and Harfoots to start coming together, McKay says:
“All our stories start to become one story, and the one story is the way the re-emergence of Sauron touches everybody and threatens the whole world.”
“The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power” second season will premiere on the service on August 29th.
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