Lord Of The Rings showrunners compare Sauron to some real villains, like Walter White or Tony Soprano
Meanwhile, the actor playing Sauron talks about his suspicions that he was, in fact, playing Sauron
[Note: This article contains spoilers for the first-season finale of Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power. Big, flaming-eye-style spoilers. You’ve been warned.]
This week’s first-season finale for Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings show, The Rings Of Power, ended on a couple of big reveals, indicating that multiple, apparently original, characters from the show were actually major figures from J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium all along. Leaving aside Daniel Weyman’s The Stranger, and his episode-ending decision to “follow your nose”—thus revealing his true identity as Fruit Loops pitch-bird Toucan Sam—the big reveal, of course, was…
Wait, hold on, we never know how many paragraphs down Facebook’s going to pull with these articles, and holy Valinor but do we not want to hear from the spoilerphobes about this one.
Okay, that oughtta be enough: The big reveal, of course, was that Charlie Vickers has not, in fact, been playing a blacksmith-king named Halbrand all this time, but is in fact LOTR Big Bad Sauron. Now, Vickers has given an interview to THR talking about the big reveal, including when he found out—it wasn’t immediately—and discussing Sauron’s internal life, something Tolkien rarely gets into in the books.
Specifically, Vickers notes that he wasn’t told he was playing Sauron until filming the show’ third episode, meaning that his first appearances as the character, floating out of the fog on a raft and meeting eventual mortal frenemy Galadriel, was done in the dark. Mostly, at least: Vickers does note that he was asked to audition for the show with both Richard III and Satan’s lines from Paradise Lost, so he did suspect that something was up.
From there, it was some serious MCU-style secret-keeping: Vickers describes being hounded by friends, who picked up clues about the character’s possibly sinister nature, asking him to confirm or deny. “I’ve had people showing me pictures of the King of the Dead, who’s literally a skeleton, and putting it next to my face and saying, ‘You look exactly like this guy,’” Vickers reported. Brutal! (Even among the regular cast members, only Morfydd Clark was initially privy to the news.)
Interestingly, Vickers also talks about, at least, his own internal conception of Sauron, describing him as a being who loves beauty and order, and who wants to inflict it on Middle-earth for the good of everyone (Especially himself.) That being said, he also suggests that some of Halbrand’s humility might have been genuine—citing passages from Tolkien in which Sauron is said to be “repentant” after the fall of his master Morgoth, hinting that the future Dark Lord might have at least a vague interest in keeping his nose clean. (At least, at first.)
Vickers:
If his repentance is genuine, then he is seeking a new life and trying to really run away from evil. But if his repentance is not genuine, if he’s faking it, then perhaps it’s a tactic where he can buy some time and make himself look busy in Númenor while he waits for things to unfold. You can look at it both ways. I have an answer for myself, which I used while I was playing the character. But I think it’s interesting to leave it ambiguous and let people interpret it how they will.
Vickers’ comments are interesting, especially, in light of a separate interview that series showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay gave this week, in which they (somewhat inelegantly, we’d argue) tried to talk about the character’s narrative arc in the show’s second season. Here’s McKay, describing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sauron, servant of Morgoth, Lord Of The Rings, Annatar, Lord Of Gifts, The Big Eye That Needs Magical Visine, etc., in terms of some real classic TV villains, like Walter White or Tony Soprano:
Sauron can now just be Sauron. Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He’s evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he’d overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open. We’re really excited. Season two has a canonical story. There may well be viewers who are like, “This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!” In season two, we’re giving it to them.