The Rings of Power not trying to compete with Lord of the Rings…or Game of Thrones

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video this September. It’s a hugely ambitious swing for Amazon: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings remains one of the most beloved fantasy saga of all time, and Peter Jackson’s adaptations one of the most beloved fantasy movie sagas of all time. How do you live up that?

Well, if you’re showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne, you try to do your own thing and hope it can stand beside what’s come before. “Anyone approaching Lord Of The Rings on screen would be wrong not to think about how wonderfully right [Jackson] got so much of it,” McKay told Empire. “But we’re admirers from afar, that’s it. The Rings Of Power doesn’t try to compete with him.”

Ah, but Lord of the Rings isn’t the only thing The Rings of Power has to compete with. Like it or not, this new LOTR series is coming out in the shadow of Game of Thrones, which shook up the fantasy genre in the 2010s by adding buckets of blood, lots of sex and abundant cursing to the mix. HBO’s prequel to GoT, House of the Dragon, will run concurrently with The Rings of Power. Is that on McKay’s mind?

“You can psych yourself out in keeping up with the Joneses, but one of the mantras on this was ‘go back to the source material’,” the showrunner said. “What would Tolkien do?”

"Some of these other competing properties – they play one octave really beautifully. But Tolkien was playing every note on the piano. He had that variety of tones. There’s the whimsy, friendship and humour that Harry Potter is so beloved for – but there’s sophistication, politics, history, mythology and depth, too. So for us, it was about going deeper into what we are, rather than worrying about what other folks are doing."

Yeah, but there’s not much sex and violence. Tolkien didn’t play those notes; will you?

We don’t know for sure until the show premieres, but the cast is hinting at differences ahead. That’s to be expected, of course; this is a different story set thousands of years before the one we know, during the Second Age of Middle-earth. Of course it’s gonna be different.

But we’ll still see some familiar characters. For instance, the immortal elf Galadriel (played by Cate Blanchett in Jackson’s movies) is around here, this time played by Welsh actor Morfydd Clark. She told Empire that shooting the show felt “like being on a school trip.” This younger version of Galadriel does a lot of “swimming, riding, [and] climbing”:

"I had to find that balance between someone who has got an element of the eternal but hasn’t yet seen it all. Don’t expect the same character that you meet later on."

Again, it makes sense that a younger Galadriel would be a bit different from the one we meet in The Lord of the Rings…although, by the time of the Second Age she was already thousands of years old, so she’s pretty experienced either way. Although again, Galadriel was always a bit of a rebel among the elves, even going back to her earliest days in the blessed land of Valinor. I look forward to seeing what the show will do with her.

Meet Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor

Another important elf character from this period is Celebrimbor, whom the dark lord Sauron tricks into making the titular Rings of Power. You remember the little poem right?

"Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,Nine for mortal men doomed to die,One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne;In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie."

Celebrimbor makes all but the One. He should be an important character in this story, and Empire has revealed a picture of the actor playing him — Charles Edwards — in costume.

The Rings of Power is already planned out for five seasons

Back to the showrunners, they talked to Empire about how much of the series they’d mapped out ahead of time. It’s a lot. “The rights that Amazon bought were for a 50-hour show,” said JD Payne. “They knew from the beginning that was the size of the canvas – this was a big story with a clear beginning, middle and end. There are things in the first season that don’t pay off until Season 5. We even know what our final shot of the last episode is going to be.”

Amazon is spending a ton of money on this project, so it probably doesn’t hurt to have a long-game plan ahead of time. But Payne and Patrick McKay assure us it’s all being done is service of a genuinely good story. “The pressure would drive us insane if we didn’t feel like there was a story here that didn’t come from us,” McKay said. “It comes from a bigger place. It came from Tolkien and we’re just the stewards of it. We trust those ideas so deeply, because they’re not ours. We’re custodians, at best.”

Payne agrees that Tolkien is always their north star. “[W]e’re doing what [J.R.R.] Tolkien wanted,” he said. “It was like Tolkien put some stars in the sky and let us make out the constellations.”

"In his letters [particularly in one to his publisher], Tolkien talked about wanting to leave behind a mythology that ‘left scope for other minds and hands, wielding the tools of paint, music and drama.’ As long as we felt like every invention of ours was true to his essence, we knew we were on the right track."

We’ll see how this all comes together when The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.

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