‘Rings of Power’ Bosses on New Parts of Middle-earth, Last-Minute Visual Effects and Why They Haven’t Changed Course From Season 1
variety.comAdam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Before any of the first season of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” had streamed on Amazon Prime Video in 2022, executive producers and showrunners J.D.
Payne and Patrick McKay had already finished much of their work constructing the story for Season 2. That’s partly due to the free time provided by the COVID shutdown in 2020.
But, in truth, Payne and McKay say they’ve known for years how the show will recount the rise of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) through the Second Age of Middle-earth, the millennia-spanning era leading to the events of J.R.R.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels. “It’s surprisingly more mapped out than you would expect,” McKay says. Season 2 opens, for example, with a sequence the writers first conceived six years ago: the depiction of what McKay calls “the show-canon origin story” for Sauron, a geeky way of acknowledging that many details about the Second Age, unwritten by Tolkien, had to be invented for the series.
Read more on variety.com