In the wake of the Season 2 finale, Collider had the opportunity to speak via Zoom with showrunnersJ.D.
PayneandPatrick McKayabout some of the most spoiler-filled moments we couldn’t discuss ahead of premiere time.
COLLIDER: In our last conversation,we spoke about that flashback opening.
Image by Zanda Rice
What about Jack [Lowden] made him the right choice to play this Sauron 1.0?
PATRICK MCKAY: We’re fans of him.
I feel like it was inDunkirkthat we first were like, Who is this amazing leading man?
Image via Prime Video
Then, our amazing casting director, Theo Park, was like, What about Jack?
We got a call with him and pitched him, and we’re like, You get murdered.
He’s like, Sounds great.
Image via Amazon Prime Video
PAYNE: He has a very angelic vibe about him.
Charlie [Vickers] is obviously a very, very handsome man, but in a different way.
We see him a little more rugged and sort of worldly as his incarnations continue.
We’re going to control everybody.
That’s how we’re going to win, and hes betrayed.
That dream is with him all season, but you’ve watched how low he was brought.
Image via Prime Video
One of the big questions from Season 1 is, How did he end up on a raft?
Well, hopefully, now we’re answering that.
Maybe that becomes a thing we keep doing in the future.
Well have to see.
We hear a voice, but we don’t actually see a presence.
I was wondering about the decision to hint at Goldberry.
Epic drama set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth.
PAYNE: It’s interesting.
He might, later on, when hes a little more geographically-centric in the Third Age.
But with her, we felt like that was as far as we were comfortable going.
He’s lulling the hobbits to sleep.There’s somethingotherabout Tom Bombadil, about his entire environs and his house.
We’re just trying to subtly lay in that something is not quite all as it seems.
There’s something other about Tom and his world and his house and where hes coming from.
He’s always coming at things from a slightly oblique angle.
So, part of that is just the ambiance of strangeness we wanted to bring to the screen.
Last time we spoke, you couldn’t really share who Ciaran Hinds was playing.
We still don’t know, really.
PAYNE: He is not Saruman.
We can say that wedoknow who he is.
MCKAY: But it’s all part of the journey.
Good things come to those who wait.
Season 1 was, Who is Sauron?
And Season 2 was building to the reveal of Gandalf.
PAYNE: The answer is yes.
Was there ever a plan to bring Sauron and Galadriel together sooner than the finale fight?
MCKAY: In the early writing stages, we wondered if there was another…
But I think very quickly it felt like, No, no, no.
We looked at sequels we admire.
That’s what you do.
MCKAY: It was the day of shooting.
And it just played really beautifully.
The story really leans into, especially in Season 2, the humanity of the Orcs.
People were surprised to see younger Orcs and the implications of a family unit.
He has a scene with Galadriel He offered me an army.
Whatd he offer you?
Adar says, He offered me children.
So he has gone into partnership with Sauron.
MCKAY: Whatever he wanted has been perversely fulfilled and wasted on him.
Its the monkeys paw, right?
PAYNE: Yeah, exactly.
You see it throughout Tolkien they’re not just monsters, even though etymologically the name means demon.
They still have humanity.
He’s got Orcs being mowed down as cannon fodder, but he had conflicted feelings about that.
I guess they’re a species.
They’re not quite animals.
They’re more than that.
They must multiply the way that creatures of Iluvatar do.
We feel that Adars story is a tragic one.
Or at least we feel that way.
We find when they betray him and kill him, it’s brutal.
It’s a patricide.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the status of Season 3.
What can you share about where you are in the writing-development process?
MCKAY: We, unfortunately, can say nothing other than we are prepping another season.
That’s really all we can say.
We’re very excited.
PAYNE: Thats good.
What do the two of you feel like it says, that the series continues to do well?
MCKAY: That makes our day to hear.
There are so many different characters and worlds and so much imagination is poured into every frame.
We’ve all worked very hard to make something that’s hopefully worth your time.
If you like the show,we feel that there’s stuff to see in asecondviewing.
We would only be so lucky if people are rediscovering it or discovering it for the first time.
We’ve tried to build this thing to last, so touch wood.
