In November 2017, amazon acquired the global television rights to the books of The Lord of the rings. As reported, the number Jeff Bezos put on the table was 250 million dollars. This, along with others $462 million in production costs for the first season, converts to the rings of power in the most expensive series in history.
Years after the success of the movies Peter Jackson –with executives from all over the world listening to proposals of all kinds, from a spin-off of Gimli to a show about the young Aragorn– Hollywood has ventured to re-adapt the work of JRR Tolkien. And it does it in a big way, with fifty hours of footage planned to be distributed in five seasons. The expectation is very high. The hype is on a knife edge. Be careless for a moment and this report will be filled with phrases from the movies.
The two men responsible for carrying this heavy load are J. D. Payne Y Patrick McKay. Before becoming showrunners of this massive project, which they themselves would present to Amazon, nothing on their IMDb page indicated that they would become the next ones in charge of resurrecting the stories of elves and dwarves.
Friends since high school, graduates in Literature from Yale, they had only collaborated in the development of several scripts for BadRobot, The company of JJ Abrams. Both admit to being followers of Tolkien’s legacy and refer to this opportunity as a dream come true, speaking passionately of the material at their disposal.
“There is something in Tolkien’s work that connects with you in a different way”, expresses JD, vehement. “Her wisdom of him fits in moments of pain and joy, in funerals and baptisms.” To survive this crusade to earn the status of true nerds before fans who have already unconsciously sharpened their expectations, JD and Patrick have several daggers stored in their robes. The first, Galadriel. “If you’re a Galadriel geek, I can assure you we’ll satisfy you on many levels,” confesses JD.
Although this is a choral series, full of new maps, races and characters, it is true that Galadriel, an essential woman in Tolkien’s mythology, is the most visible face of The Rings of Power. relieving Cate Blanchetteyou are found Morfydd Clark, Swiss-born but Welsh-raised actress whose journey to being the most famous elf of the Noldor lineage has not been an easy one.
“The project came to me through my agents, without a title,” he explains to CINEMANIA in London. “We only knew that they were looking for actors with experience around texts of Shakespeare. I came to tryouts knowing nothing and an actress sitting next to me said, “Do you know what this is? The Lord of the rings!”. I had to go to the bathroom to calm down.
The murmur of an unnamed project would soon turn into a call confirming his role. In fact, if you look for videos of the premiere at the Toronto Film Festival of the film LThe incredible story of David Copperfield, you can see how Clark, who had just heard the news before going on stage to present the screening, disappears from the shot to pass out behind the screen.
All the actors with whom CINEMANIA has been able to speak agree on the volatile nature of the casting process, with long weeks of tests without much information followed by urgent calls to close contracts and trips to New Zealand. For example, another of the claims in the rings of power is the young Elrond, interpreted by Robert Aramayo. Also from London, the actor details that his hiring also had surprises.
“In New Year’s, when I already knew I had the role, I was in New York,” explains Aramayo. “I had gone to a concert by The Strokes. My idea was to return to England two days later to be with my family. And when I left the concert, they told me that I had to go to New Zealand right away. So my parents said goodbye expecting to see me three days later, but we spent almost two years apart.
Because, indeed, the pandemic appeared on Earth (the entire one) when these guys were in the middle of filming. A break that served so that the entire team could rest –many mention, with a sparkle in their eyes, the possibility of taking courses or rehearsing without limits– and focus more calmly on the titanic work that lay ahead.
amorous hairy
“Is that man Gandalf?” is the first question that CINEMANIA asks markella kavenagh Y Megan Richards. These two actresses play, respectively, Nori Y Poppy. If they sound like hobbit names to you, you’re not wrong: they’re hairy, a race prior to the lineage of Hobbits. bilbo Y Sam. They will find, submerged between rock and fire and after having fallen from the sky, a peculiar bearded man known as “the stranger” who reminds the gray wizard.
At the reference to Gandalf, they laugh nervously and politely go on to describe the dynamic between their characters. They are best friends: Nori is the crazy one and Poppy is the prudent one. The hairy breed (harfoots in English) also have big feet and pointed ears, but unlike hobbits, they are nomads. Your motto? “No hair is left behind.”
Megan and Markella shed light on the experience, as actresses, of shooting for this huge series. On the one hand, they are tremendously descriptive with the help that makeup and costumes gave them. “As an actress,” Megan describes, “you work from the intellectual perspective of the character. But thanks to the practical work of the technicians or thanks to the presence of the sets, you understand how her mind works, where she comes from, who she is”.
Did you have, throughout the shoot, to react to, say, green screens where you didn’t know what was going on? “Yes, of course, there was some of that – Megan laughs – but the fact of being together and sharing that knowledge helped us”. “We received all the scripts, except the one for the last episode”confirms Markella, who claims to have always felt sheltered, even in the shadows of CGI, by JD, Patrick and their references.
They have reforged it
The hairy ones are not the only novelty of The rings of power. Included in the aforementioned acquisition of rights by Amazon are the appendices that accompany the original books, notes in which Tolkien described the past of Middle-earth.
Thanks to this material and without the possibility of accessing any other (such as The Silmarillion)The rings of power allows us to enter the second age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before what happened with Frodo and the ring, and in the kingdom of Numenor, in which Isildur is a rebellious young man who seeks to find his identity away from the orders of his father, Elendil.
We can also dig into the splendor of Khazad-dûm, also called moria, where Durin IV (Owain Arthur) prepares to rule alongside his wife, the priestess and princess Disa (Sophia Nomvete). All these kingdoms enjoy peace after the wars against Morgoth, lord of the shadow, whose defeat left his servant Sauron wandering helpless.
Endless narratives that mix documentation and creation, fidelity and revision to the original work. Every step since the invention is argued by its showrunners as legitimate (“Tolkien wanted future generations to reinterpret his work”) and each direct inspiration is humbly announced.
“When there was a doubt”, defends JD again, “going back to the books was the solution. Each people of Middle-earth is so well defined in Tolkien’s work that as long as we stayed true to its foundations, we knew we wouldn’t screw up.”
The promotion of the series is sometimes so frustrating that when CINEMANIA asks the showrunners if Howard Shore has collaborated on the soundtrack, they say they can not confirm anything. Days later, it becomes clear: the composer of Peter Jackson’s films signs the main theme, but it will be Bear McCreary (The Walking Dead) who writes the rest of the pieces.
The Balrog has also made an appearance in promotional teasers, and we’ve even read Lindsay Weber, their production company, to say that they would be delighted to have Ian McKellen. We may not know what’s in store for us power rings, if this series is going to be a success or a failure, if we should have come this far. But here we are. Let’s see what happens.
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“Tolkien wanted future generations to reinterpret his work”: this is how ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ was made