Lord of the Rings star thinks Amazon’s show will last “at least 10 years”

Although it’s been in production for a while now, we still know surprisingly little about Amazon’s upcoming The Lord of the Rings series, except that it’s set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the story we know.

But information is starting to trickle out, including from cast member Sir Lenny Henry, who talked about the show during a recent interview for Radio 4’s Saturday Live. “For the last two years I’ve been working on Lord of the Rings, and it’s an extraordinary thing,” Henry said. “It’s the biggest television show that’s ever been made in terms of money and head count. Literally, a hundred people on set glaring at you and trying to work out what you’ll look like four feet tall. It’s just been an amazing experience, life-changing for me.”

You may have already guessed what the crack about being four feet tall means: Henry is playing a Hobbit. “I’m a Harfoot, because JRR Tolkien – who was also from Birmingham – suddenly there were Black hobbits. I’m a Black hobbit, it’s brilliant.”

"What’s notable about this run of the books, it’s a prequel to the age that we’ve seen in the films and books. It’s about the early days of the Shire and of Tolkien’s environment, so we’re an indigenous population of Harfoots, we’re hobbits but we’re called Harfoots. We’re multi-cultural, we’re a tribe not a race, so there are Black, Asian and brown, even Maori types within it. It’s a whole brand new set of adventures that seed some of the origins of different characters and it’s going to take at least 10 years to tell the story."

Henry also said that the team uses J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Silmarillion — which is primarily about the First Age of Middle-earth but also touches on the Second and Third — acted as a “cheat sheet” for producers. “The writers have a lot of fun in extrapolating it all out, and it’s going to be very exciting…There’s a very strong female presence in this, there are going to be female heroes in this evocation of the story, and there are going to be little people as usual.”

The Lord of the Rings show on Amazon will include Hobbits

Whoo, that was a lot of information! The biggest thing for me is that Henry’s words seem to confirm that the writers are pretty much going to make this story up. The Silmarillion has one section about the Second Age, but it’s not particularly robust, so Amazon is going to have to delve far deeper into characters than Tolkien ever did, and then invent others. In fact — and I could be misremembering — but I don’t recall Hobbits being mentioned at all in The Silmarillion, at least not in the sections about the First and Second Ages, so everything involving them will be new.

I’m ever more curious to see what Amazon has for us when The Lord of the Rings show premieres in September of 2022.

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h/t Digital Spy