The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is now streaming on Prime Video.
Ahead of the show’s season two debut, I had the chance to chat with Ismael Charles Edwards (Celebrimbor) and Charlie Vickers (Sauron/Annatar) about the new season, returning to Middle-earth, their characters’ growth from last season to this one, what they enjoy or relate to most about their characters, and more.
Regarding returning to the set for the second season, Edwards was exceptionally excited as he had a new forge at his disposal.
Edwards said, “Well, first of all, we had a new set, which was really exciting. And I loved my forge in season one, but season two was just the best because it was like five times the size of it, and the most satisfying thing about it is that it’s once all the walls are in because you can move bits of the wall out to get the cameras in and move kits in and stuff. But once you’re in there, it feels totally enclosed. And the camera can do 360, and so can we. So it was a wonderful playground for however many months we were in there.”
One of the most interesting aspects of the series is that despite having so many characters, the show can still display excellent character growth from the first season to the second.
Vickers shared, “It’s been awesome. I mean, from a personal standpoint, there were differences in the character, but there were differences in what I was trying to develop between Halbrand and Annatar. But the real joy of the season came with the scenes that we were doing, and it was just a pleasure to go to work every day and not know where something is going to go right, like we had. We were really lucky to film everything chronologically, and it meant that we could really explore and, you know, things move fast, but I felt like we were really afforded time because we were all on this set, and it felt like a stage, and it had a lot of spontaneity and levity despite the darkness of what was going on.”