Prepare for desert Hobbits, Shelob, and tons of Sauron in The Rings of Power season 2

The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is coming down the pike, and the team has a lot of new stuff to show us. What was happening during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Bilbo, Aragorn and most of that crowd was born? We'll find out late this month. And in the meantime, the cast and crew are here to preview it all:

The Rings of of Power season 2 is "the villains' journey"

The Rings of Power is an ensemble show, but season 1 spent a lot of time with characters like Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), an elf who was taken in by the dark lord Sauron, then disguising himself as a mortal man named Halbrand. "She has really made a fool of herself," Clark said of Galadriel's journey. "The elves aren't really known for doing that, so she’s in a whole new space where she’s no longer the voice of authority and reason. He's been very successful at destabilizing his enemies."

Sauron, of course, is the great enemy of The Lord of the Rings series, but in the Second Age we catch up with him during something of a rebuilding period. "In Sauron's mind, he's the hero of his own story," co-showrunner JD Payne told Entertainment Weekly. "His idea of himself is that he wants to heal and rehabilitate Middle-earth. He's got a very clear vision for how it should be done, and the only problem is other people keep on getting in the way."

This season, we'll get to know his inner thoughts much better, according to actor Charlie Vickers. "From a storytelling perspective, instead of trying to guess who Sauron is, we're now inside his mind," he said. "In the past, the camera would cut away from him when he had his private thoughts. Now the camera follows him through those thoughts. The audience is in on it, which I think is quite fun."

Sauron, as ever, wants control. He intends to achieve this by creating magical rings — rings of power, if you will — and distributing them to powerful people throughout Middle-earth. Unbeknownst to the people who wear them, Sauron will maintain a degree of control over the rings, and thus exert his influence.

For his plan to work, he'll need a collaborator, and he finds one in the Elven smith Celebrimbor, played by Charles Edwards. "The way I see it, his ambition has been eating away at him," Edwards said. "He wants to produce something that will help the world, but also will ensure that his name is on a plaque somewhere forever. So it's a double-edged sword with him. He's vain, he's ambitious, and he wants to achieve something that will overshadow his grandfather's work. Now he thinks he's found the key."

"Celebrimbor has the ability, and Sauron has the vision. It's an interesting give-and-take, which often happens in these kinds of relationships where they both need each other badly. As you'll see, it plays out in a very interesting way. It's something so personal and psychological that is playing out against the backdrop of Middle-earth and the epic scale that you would expect from The Lord of the Rings."

To put Celebrimbor at east, Sauron assumes a new form this season: Annatar, the Lord of Gifts. "In terms of his physicality and appearance, we designed everything from the perspective of: What would best sway Celebrimbor?" Vickers said. 'The character had to have a weight and power about him, so that someone like Celebrimbor, who is the great smith, would be persuaded."

My biggest question going into season 2 is why Celebrimbor would willingly work with Sauron when his identity has been revealed, new disguise or no. I guess Sauron just has a way of slipping past your defenses. "Other villains might try to find your weakness and poke at it. Sauron does something different where he tries to find what your strength is," Payne said. "The image of the eye is really appropriate, because Sauron sees you. He sees the best version of who you want to be, and then he's able to take your own desires for good and twist them to bring about his own evil ends."

Everyone's going on an adventure

The three elven rings — Narya, Nenya and Vilya — are already made. Now Celebrimbor and Sauron go about making rings for the rest of the peoples of Middle-earth, including the dwarves, who are dealing with a crisis.

"We lose light in Khazad-dûm and therefore we can't grow crops, so the kingdom is dying," said Owain Arthur, who plays Prince Durin IV. "So rings are made by Celebrimbor and are introduced to Khazad-dûm. What we see from these rings is a quick fix, if you like, but the knock-on effects of having those rings in Khazad-dûm seeps its way into everything and everyone, primarily with King Durin III. Prince Durin sees a change in his father — a darkness in his father — which has a massive effect on him."

Co-showrunner Patrick McKay detailed how this story is inspired by the the appendices to The Lord of the Rings itself, which sketches out the major events of the Second Age in bullet point form. "There are tantalizing hints in the source text that the dwarven rings didn't really control the dwarves the way Sauron might've liked, but it did stoke their greed," he said. "That sent us down this rabbit hole of 'What about Peter Mullan going mad as a villain in Khazad-dum in season 2?' The whole idea of doing a show in the Second Age was that it's not a fixed target, there's an enormous amount of room for creation and improv within a loose framework. The dwarven rings are a great example where it's like, 'What exactly did they do? How might that play on a father-son relationship?'"

Elsewhere, Nori the harfoot has traveled with the mysterious Stranger into the desert land of Rhûn, which hasn't featured much in The Lord of the Rings story before. Harfoots are nomadic versions of hobbits that predate the ones we know from The Lord of the Rings. In Rhûn, they'll meet another kind of proto-hobbit: the stoors, the tribe of hobbits that will eventually produce folks like Sméagol.

Don't expect anyone like Sméagol to show up on The Rings of Power, though; this is set way before his time. “The stoors’ ancestry at some point was nomadic,” said Tanya Moodie, who plays community leader Gundabel. “But over the years, we as a group have settled and that has become our culture, to look after one another.” 

We're far from the Shire here, but production designer Kristian Milsted's description of where the stoors live kind of recalls that idyllic place, only rockier. “The canyon that the stoors call home is such a wonderful little oasis, but it's a harsh world,” he said. “We wanted to make something that was very different from the Shire that we've seen on screen. So it was more like they have these abodes that are dug into the rock of this very hostile environment, which creates a very close-knit community. They have a written history, they have a library, they have a map of the stars, they have a whole history woven into this set.”

And there's even more plot to cover. Remember that Isildur, a transplant from the distant island nation of Númenor, traveled to Middle-earth in the first season of the show. He's stuck there now and longing for a way home. "I'm awoken in a cave and I have to fight my way through Shelob to get to safety, which is an obscene way to start a season," said actor Maxim Baldry. "It's a story of survival and it's a story about 'be careful what you wish for.' He grows from a boy into a man and has to learn who to trust and who not to trust."

Shelob, of course, is the giant spider that menances Sam and Frodo in the original Lord of the Rings story, so The Rings of Power is certainly not above trotting out some old favorites for the fans. We'll delight in all the details when the show returns to Amazon Prime Video on August 29.

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h/t EW