The Rings of Power star talks “prehistoric hobbits,” defends showrunners

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is Amazon’s wildly expensive, huge swing of a fantasy epic. This isn’t The Lord of the Rings story you know; it’s set thousands of years before Gandalf arrived in the Shire, although there will be familiar elements. For instance, Hobbits are still around…although at this point in the history of Middle-earth they’re called harfoots, and they haven’t settled in any one place yet.

Actor Dylan Smith plays a Harfoot character named Largo Brandyfoot. “We’re a refugee people who have been on the move ever since the last great war when we were sort of stripped from our homeland,” he told Yahoo News, “and because of that experience we’re a people who are absolutely primarily concerned with their survival, and to survive, we believe we both have to keep moving and stay completely hidden from the world, and that’s quite absolute.”

This could be tricky, because The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t write about what hobbits were doing during the Second Age, which is when The Rings of Power takes place. He didn’t even confirm that hobbits existed during this time. But Smith underlines that all this invention took place “under very strict Tolkien supervision” from the author’s family.

As for Largo, he’s “a devoted father to my two daughters…a devoted husband to my wife Marigold [Sara Zwangobani]. I’m dealing with my oldest amazing daughter Nori [Markella Kavenagh], sort of a young woman coming-of-age, she’s got her own ideas about the way…we as a society should be, about the way she should live, and I’m quite an encouraging, mischievous father who is very much in favor of my daughter’s whimsies and her authenticity. I think I deeply admire my daughter, for her authenticity, for her courage, for the fact that she believes we should strive for more, and always working through that conflict of empowering my daughter to go off in the world and at the same time, try to protect her from the potential evils that lay out there.”

Meet Pharazôn, a guy who totally isn’t a villain in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The Rings of Power is going for sprawl. The Hobbits will have their story. We’ll also follow the elves, including familiar faces like Elrond and Galadriel; elves are immortal, remember, so they were doing just fine several thousand years ago.

And we’ll travel to the island of Númenor, where a long-lived race of human beings have built a mighty civilization. One of the our points of contacts will be Pharazôn, played by Trystan Gravelle. Anyone who’s read Tolkien’s The Silmarillion might read that name and hear alarm bells, but at the start of the show, he’s just trying to do his civil duty.

“We see a man whose seafaring days, whose warrior days are not behind him, but he’s got to take on a different role now,” Gravelle told ComicBook.com. “His cousin, Queen Miriel, is now the queen regent. Her father’s ill, so she’s, in his stead, ruling Númenor. And so she needs some help from her cousin, who is Pharazôn, who has the ear of all the guildsmen, who has the ear of all the people of Númenor, and so is the man to bring the island together to listen to Queen Miriel. So very much at the moment, he’s an advisor, a chancellor, and very much a public servant, and it’s not a job or a task that he is reluctant to do. He has a very, very deep love for his island and for his kingdom.”

But things might not stay that away. We visit Númenor at a tricky time for the island, the Númenóreans have achieved incredible things, but they are not elves. They are not immortal. And they’re starting to chafe at the Ban of the Valar, which holds that they can travel anywhere within Middle-earth that they wish…so long as they don’t travel to Aman, the sacred continent where elves dwell with the Valar, who are basically gods on earth. Some Númenóreans are happy with that and continue to worship the Valar, but others — like Pharazôn — question it.

“Every relationship, every community, every society, it could be like a powder keg, and it could go off at any moment,” Gravelle said. “And he’s well aware of these things. And coupled with the Ban of the Valar, the gift of men that the Faithful believe in, he’s more skeptical about that and going, ‘Well, why can’t we live forever? Why can’t we travel here? Why can’t we do this? Are we just second-class visitors then, to this earth that we live on?’ And there are a few existential questions that need answering.”

"If you live forever, you can afford to spit the wine out into the spittoon. If you’re not going to live forever, you might want to just swallow that wine. So maybe there is less of a respect for nature, and that’s why you hew from the rock, these great statues that we see in Númenor. Then you are like, ‘Look what we’re capable of. We’re not here for as long a time as elves, but look at what we’re capable of, look at what we can do. We are going to create these statues because we are not here forever.’ And that is very much in the back of everybody’s mind in Númenor, and I think Pharazôn. more so than anybody else, I think he does typify that.Looking at the micro and macro of any situation is vital. And some people can lose perspective of the macro or they can lose perspective of the micro, and then all of a sudden, altruism can creep in, in a very bad way. And all of a sudden you’re doing things for the greater good. And at first, that’s fine, because it’s for the greater good, but then how far is too far?"

How far is too far? Something tells me that Pharazôn is going to find out.

The Rings of Power showrunners are “devoted” to the series

The Rings of Power has grand ambitions. At the helm are Patrick McKay and JD Payne, two guys who didn’t have a ton of Hollywood experience before snagging this huge job. Some fans are worried that this is a bad sign, but Smith is having none of it.

“I am interested in sort of what experience actually means when it comes to this, I think it is such a specific world for such a devoted fan base that the most important thing you need is to have the most devoted fans to help this writing,” the actor said. “I think you couldn’t have two more devoted fans…than the two showrunners, they are devoted, one of them speaks fluent Elvish.”

"The Tolkien estate has supervised the creation of the show with a fine tooth comb, representatives from the Tolkien estate have been in the writers room from day one. I think there’s an absolute devotion to getting this right…Before I even accepted the offer, I was utterly blown away by their knowledge, their humour, their wisdom, and then when we got to the first table read…I was completely gobsmacked by the talent in the room."

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.

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