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Spoilers forThe Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powerseason-two finale,Shadow and Flame,below.
Charlie Vickers loves torturing and murdering Elf-Lords.
From a purely artistic perspective, that is.
Its such an iconic image from the books, Celebrimbors body impaled full of arrows.
Weve just tried to bring that to life.
What influenced the creation of that sense of mounting dread on set?Gaslight.
The showrunners were keen for us to use elements of that film; certainly the themes of it apply.
We had a lot of fun in the filming process.
Its dark, and theres some heavy things, but we didnt stay in that darkness.
But Im reluctant to do the humanizing side of a villain like this.
Its a theme in contemporary media that villains become three dimensional.
He loves fair things, he loves craft.
Sauron believes he can do it better.
Even if it boosted his power, he created this huge vulnerability, whether or not he realized it.
Thats why the moments helosescontrol are interesting.
Celebrimbor saying The rings are controllingyou upsets Sauron so much.
I always think thats very un-Sauron: the messy, chaotic anger that comes out occasionally.
Could he have shared control?
In his battle with Galadriel, he says hed have made her Queen of Middle-earth.
You see it inThe Lord of the Rings, in the Mirror of Galadriel.
But ruling with her is a step he never would have taken.
He could never share this level of power with someone.
It would have been him as king and her as his assistant.
Last season, Sauron posed as Halbrand, a human.
This season, hes Annatar, a visitor from the gods, and he looks the part.
The costumes inform your movements.
I cant see when Im wearing them.
All I see would be a green haze, and I have no peripheral vision.
Simply being on set wearing them had this weird effect of making me feel otherworldly.
Everything is blurry, and it was a useful tool:Maybe this is how a Maia sees things.
I worked with a movement coach to develop the way Sauron moved.
I wanted everything to be economical.
He has all this power contained within him, and every movement is thought through.
He does nothing unnecessary.
Hes standing almost like a pin.
His legs are really close together, his arms are by his sides … its unsettling.
I remember watching that and being like,Thats really cool.
I can use an element of that.He never blinked throughout the whole performance.
I do blink sometimes, with the intention of showing vulnerability, just to soften people up.
It creates that eerie feeling with a camera.
Speaking of horror, the show reconnects Sauron with his monstrous roots.
When youre playing Sauron, there is so much canon that the opportunities are limitless.
Pure hatred and evil you mentioned earlier the tendency for dramas to have morally complex villains or anti-heroes.
But I cant imagine Sauron going to his therapist after a murder like Tony Soprano, you know?
Your Sauron is constantly lying, all the time, to hurt people, on purpose.
As a book nerd, Im like, yeah, thats my Sauron.
Payne and Patrick McKay, the showrunners.
Something else I always try and remember is the Child Catcher inChitty Chitty Bang Bang.
But for much of that battle, he and Celebrimbor are off in this little world of their own.
Youre standing there and you still get the scale of the production, becausetheyve built the forge.
But then you go outside and it really hits home, because things are exploding.
And those explosions arereal.
The courtyard in the city thats all real.
Its just the horizon thats CGI.
You see the number of people who are there to help tell Saurons story.
But ultimately, were children going to play on this set every day.
