Charlie Vickers played Sauron in the first and second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. But Sauron is a being of many faces. In the very first scene of season 2 — one of the better scenes of the season, honestly — we see Sauron as he was right at the end of the First Age of Middle-earth, shortly after the fall of his master Morgoth, the original dark lord. Sauron is trying to rally the surviving orcs to his side, and he's not played by Charlie Vickers at this point, but rather English actor Jack Lowden:
Sauron's speech doesn't go well. In a new storyline made up for the show — none of this is mentioned in any of J.R.R. Tolkien's works — Sauron is betrayed by his lieutenant Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and literally stabbed in the back with Morgoth's iron crown. He then turns into a pile of goo, and we watch in montage form as he reforms himself into Charlie Vickers.
For the record, Jack Lowden never actually met Charlie Vickers, as he told ComicBook.com: "They just asked me to come do it. I think it was a day, or was it two days? I think it was two days. I was just in, out. I didn’t meet anybody," he said. "They just said, ‘We’d love you to play a version of Sauron in front of a whole bunch of orcs.’”
So he didn't get to play much Sauron and likely won't in the future, unless we get a flashback to the First Age. Still, Lowden is thrilled he got to be a part of the show. “They’re amongst my favorite films ever made, Lord of the Rings,” he said. “So I was just like, ‘Yes, whatever you need me to do.’ To just be stood there with some seasoned orcs that had been in all three films, to just be stood there watching these guys, it’s just incredible. The makeup and these guys, the way they would move. I was just there. It was just mad. But no, I was kept away from everybody. It was so secret that I was amazed that I wasn’t driven to set with a bag over my head, to be honest.”
Prime Video has officially renewed The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for a third season, although we probably won't see new episodes for a while. Originally, the showrunners had a five-season plan for The Rings of Power, but I wonder if the show might not end a little early; the series is very expensive to make, and doesn't seem to be as hugely popular as Amazon was hoping.
Then again, Amazon just canceled its other big high fantasy show The Wheel of Time, so maybe it'll use some of that budget to keep The Rings of Power going through to its planned end. If you ask some fans, Amazon saved the wrong show, but that's another story:
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