Charlie Vickers (Sauron) talks getting into disguise as Annatar in The Rings of Power season 2

The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is coming out soon, and while the series has a large ensemble cast, the two most prominent stars are probably Morfydd Clark and Charlie Vickers, who play the ageless elf Galadriel and the ancient dark lord Sauron respectively. The two of them sat down with Empire to talk about what's to come.

The Rings of Power is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Bilbo, Aragorn and many of the other characters we know from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings are born. Tolkien wrote about the shape of the Second Age in books like The Silmarillion, but it's hard to predict what's going to happen on the show, which has largely gone its own way. All Vickers and Clark can do is tease their performances. "I enjoyed the second season a lot more as a performer, because I felt I had a level of familiarity with what I was doing and the world I was stepping into," Vickers said.

For the record, both Vickers and Clark are very familiar with Tolkien's works, Clark from an early age. "My parents liked The Lord Of The Rings, and so did my close group of friends, so I assumed everyone was obsessed with it, and would be one of those people who’d say, 'What? You haven’t read it?'" she said. "So I did feel there’d been a lot of life-training for this, and it was really fun to get deeper into it, because Tolkien is so fascinating."

Vickers came to Tolkien after he got the part, devouring the appendices to The Lord of the Rings as well as The Silmarillion. When not reading, he and Clark both did a lot of combat training; we've heard season 2 will amp up the action. "Well, I don’t actually do that much fighting in the second season — ah, apart from... There is one very exciting bit, which I won’t say," Vickers hinted.

Sauron will assume another disguise in season 2, but fans aren't fooled

In terms of the plot, the second season will see Sauron again try and trick the races of Middle-earth into making rings of power, which is consistent with what Tolkien writes in The Silmarillion. He'll disguise himself as a divine being known as Annatar, pictured at the very top of this post, and act like he's offering helpful knowledge when really he has insidious plans of his own.

The problem some fans are having is that, in the first season, Sauron disguised himself as a character who doesn't appear in Tolkien's books at all: a mortal man named Halbrand, pictured right above. As Halbrand, he helped the elves make three great rings of power, but he was exposed by Galadriel in the end. How, fans ask, will a change of wig and addition of elf ears convince everyone that this is an entirely new guy? If you look at the comments below trailers for The Rings of Power season 2, fans are having a field day with this:

• "One wig to rule them all.
  One wig to hide him.
  One wig to fool them all.
  And now they can not find him."
• "But they were all of them deceived, for another wig was made..."
• "Gandalf: 'YOUUUUU shall not Paaass!!!'
  Balrog: *puts on wig
  Gandalf: “Oh, my apologies. You may pass'"

And on and on like that. I myself am pretty curious about how they're going to sell this. Vickers wasn't asked directly about it, but did talk about the new prosthetics he has to wear: "I didn’t have any prosthetics in the first season, so getting the Elf ears [as Annatar] was a whole new world for me. Coming in, like, three hours early to get the make-up on, it changes the game. And the Orcs, I think, have to come in seven hours early."

The Rings of Power season 2 premieres on Amazon Prime Video on August 29, and we'll all see how well Sauron pulls off his new disguise.

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