The Rings of Power cast talks fan backlash, enjoying the show on its own terms

The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power wrapped up in October, and while the show has taken its lumps over the years, it's found its fanbase and turned in a pretty enjoyable season of TV...if you approach it in the right way.

As a longtime Lord of the Rings dork who knows way too much about the lore of Middle-earth, watching The Rings of Power is an odd experience. The show is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings story most people know. Author J.R.R. Tolkien sketched out what happened during the Second Age, but he didn't write a novel series about it, and the producers on The Rings of Power have taken huge liberties in filling in the gaps. Sometimes the show seems like it's working hard to hew close to Tolkien's outline, and sometimes it seems completely off the map.

The cast members get that this might frustrate some viewers. "I get it. If you love the lore, you can allow the choices that we've made in the show to frustrate you if you want," actor Robert Aramayo (Elrond) told Complex. "But I don’t know, I would just implore people to think that these are a set of choices that we've made based around the limited material that we have in the Second Age...[T]his is what I think is great about Tolkien, it's that if I make a point and I say, 'Elves are like this.' Then you can say, 'Well what about this story, and I can cite this, this,' and that discourse can be fun...I would feel like I want to implore people to just look at the show."

I feel like "just looking at the show" is the only way for someone who cares about Lord of the Rings lore to enjoy it, because otherwise it's full of deviations too big to be waved away. For instance, in Tolkien's reckoning, the big events of the Second Age take place over the course of thousands of years, but on The Rings of Power they seem to be mashed together into a handful of months. Important characters like Adar and Nori are completely made up for TV, and the show is taking huge liberties with characters like Gandalf.

I'm not saying the results are bad — I more or less enjoyed the second season — but the show isn't making many serious attempts to stay true to Tolkien's vision, and actors talking about the flexibility of the lore sounds a bit like coping to me. One Tolkien professor Amazon hired to defend the show claimed there was "no such thing" as canon in The Lord of the Rings, which sounds like the kind of thing you'd only say if you'd lost some perspective. Ditto Benjamin Walker (Gil-galad) taking "comfort in the fact that the Tolkien Estate loves [The Rings of Power]. That's a pretty good endorsement where I'm sitting." Not to be overly cynical, but if Amazon paid me $250 million for my life story, I'd love whatever they produce too.

Actors vs expectations, fans vs lore, The Tolkien Estate vs J.R.R. Tolkien

But I get that the actors want to love what they're doing and I think they should, especially if it helps them do their best work. Charlie Vickers (Sauron) thinks it's best to focus on what's in front of them. "It's strange because it seems that people care about the show hugely," he said. "And I think as a cast member, so much of the stuff is out of your control. We rock up as performers and we just do our job. And I can say that every performer, every crew member, has put in everything they can. And I think that you just have to kind of be like, 'Well, I've given it my all and we've done the best that we can,' and let go of this weight of expectation and other people's opinions."

"There can be really constructive discourse around it and you learn things that might be really useful in going forward in terms of performance and whatever it might be to do with the show. But a lot of the things that are out there I just stay away from, because I know that it can be, as you say, like an echo chamber and things can get blown out of proportion. But the thing that we know is that people care and it means a lot to us that people care about the show enough to feel very passionate either way about it. And it's not up to us. People can interpret it how they will, and that's not for us to control."

I think that's a good approach for the actors to take: all they can do is play what's been written for them as well as they can; they likely couldn't change the scripts if they wanted to, and they certainly can't change what fans say about them online. "We are working on this series, and it's a long experience for us, but this is also our lives," said Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Míriel). "So if I want to define it for myself, I'm not going to let it be defined by the internet, of all things. And I feel like my advice to anybody, because everybody now is subject to everybody's opinion on anything, is: it’s just noise. You have to decide what is useful to you and what is just trash."

That's a lesson a lot of performers have to learn these days, especially those working in big franchises with large, build-in fanbases. As for a potential third season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the cast and crew seem optimistic but we haven't heard anything official yet.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.