This story first appeared in The Race Begins issue of TheWrap awards magazine.
When Amazon set out to make a “Lord of the Rings” TV series, they didn’t shrink the world of JRR Tolkien for the “small screen.” Instead, for the first time in a planned five-season storyline, the studio sought to achieve the scale, ambition and prestige of Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film trilogy.
“I’m glad that, from the beginning, Amazon had the ambition to try to match that bar,” said JA Bayona, who directed the first two episodes of the series. “And because we were going to the origins of the story, to places and characters in a way that we had never seen before, that gave us the freedom to create our own thing.”
Taking Tolkien’s work as a reference, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” takes place thousands of years before the events portrayed in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, in a time of peace and prosperity throughout the world. Middle Earth. And while it features younger versions of characters fans know and love (the elves Galadriel and Elrond and the series’ big villain, Sauron), the 10-episode first season is set in four fully realized and very different realms populated by different races. .
Visually, Bayona embraced the freedom of bringing a cinematic approach to storytelling in a prestigious television series, not despite its fantasy trappings, but to celebrate them. “It was about finding a visual language that was on a level with Tolkien’s writing,” she said.
While “The Rings of Power” features goblins, dwarves and magic rings, actress Morfyyd Clark’s first introduction to the show had a surprising hook: Shakespeare.
Clark, who plays the elven warrior Galadriel, auditioned for an unspecified project at the time that was looking for actors who had experience playing the work of the Bard. (He later learned that this was largely for the actors playing the goblins.) acts,” he said.
His fellow “Rings of Power” actor Ismael Cruz Córdova, who plays the elf Arondir, put it succinctly: “This was character work.” He stressed the importance of storytelling in all aspects of the series, not just the emotional scenes of his character, but also the action sequences. “We worked a lot to make sure we still kept the conflict, the drama, the story, and the acting in every move,” he said.
Córdova, who is from Puerto Rico, was one of many actors in “Los anillos del poder” who faced a racist backlash from fans due to his role as an elf. And while he was touched by the warm reception he received from audiences once the show premiered (“It confirmed that this representational effort really has an impact”), he struggled with the “global tsunami” of hate thrown at him during the production. “I asked myself, ‘Is all this pain and all this bullying and racism on top of the work I’m doing as an actor worth it?’” he said. “To see the love I’ve received, we’re winning and we’re not going anywhere.”
The actor said he feels more “at ease” doing season 2, which is in production in the UK. “I feel energized and supported to continue to deepen that impact.”
As for where the story goes in season two, now that Sauron has been unmasked, Clark says there’s a ripple effect on all the characters. “It’s really exciting to explore the biggest, baddest villain of all time. He is so bad!
Read more of The Race Begins issue here.
