Who is Sauron? Where is Sauron? Is that person Sauron? Those were the prevailing questions throughout The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and in the final episode the guessing game was finally put to rest. Halbrand, the castaway who saved Galadriel and presented himself as a pauper descended from kings, was really the fair form of the tyrannical sorcerer himself.

Not only did he rescue her in the first episode, but he also credits her in the finale with saving him, saying her belief in his power sustained him at a time when he thought he was lost. Of course, that was when the elven warrior thought he was a deposed king, not evil incarnate. 

The showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay spoke with Vanity Fair to walk through a season’s worth of clues that reveal Halbrand was never actually hiding who he was. Virtually everything he said and did had a dual meaning that hinted at his actual identity, if you were watching closely.

Vanity Fair: Who in the cast knew the truth about Sauron’s identity? I’m guessing Charlie Vickers probably knew, since he’s playing him, but did you keep it a secret from the rest of the cast? 

J.D. Payne: It was very, very closely guarded. He didn’t even know until maybe through episode two or early episode three, what he was was playing. We kept it that guarded.

I had my suspicions all along, but there’s a scene in the finale when Halbrand tells Galadriel, “You believed in me when no one else did.” It’s right before she figures out that he is actually Sauron, but it clearly foreshadows that, since she was alone in believing Sauron was still a threat. Was there a lot of that threaded throughout the show?

Payne: Yes, in his very first shot, he's looking over his shoulder with one eye. And in episode two, he says, “The tides of fate are flowing. Yours may be heading out.” That’s the line that Galadriel says to Frodo when the ring comes into her orbit. She’s repeating the first thing he ever said to her. She asks on the raft, “What kind of man would leave his companions to die?” He says, “The kind of man that knows how to survive.” 

McKay: Oh, it gets crazier than that. In his second line, he says, “Looks can be deceiving.”

Yes, he does.

McKay: Then later in Numenor, somebody asks him, “What’s your name?” and he says, “That depends.” And they say, “It depends on what?” He says, “How close we are.” We tried to set it up where every single line would be true to a certain extent, no matter who he is.

Payne: And then you watch him beat the crap out of those guys [in Numenor] and break the guy’s hand in a really disturbing way. You’re like, “Oh, my gosh, is he just a good fighter, or is there something a little superhuman about what he just did?” Then when Galadriel and Halbrand/Sauron have a heart-to-heart in episode five, she bears her soul and says, “I can’t stop fighting. And my friends couldn’t distinguish me from the evil I was fighting—and [Sauron] killed my brother.”

And he says, “…I’m sorry about your brother.” He’s the guy who effectively killed her brother! So is there a real pathos that’s happening there, where he is genuinely apologizing? Is he messing with her? We designed every moment so you can be, “is it a thing he’s saying because it’s true? Or is he playing a role to manipulate her?”

McKay: In the fourth episode, she asks him for advice, and he says basically, “the way you beat your enemies is to figure out what they need and figure out how to give it to them. Help them master their fear. And then you can master them.” And that’s exactly what he’s doing to her the entire season—maybe what he’s going to do to everybody over the following seasons. That’s his modus operandi.

In the final episode, we see the creation of the three rings Sauron will later use to try and control the elves. They’re making them out of mithril, and using the most powerful forge ever built, but it keeps backfiring. Halbrand/Sauron proposes they stop trying to force the elements together and instead let them mingle and draw together on their own. Is this a metaphor for what he’s doing to the various societies and tribes in Middle-earth?

Payne: It’s a moment he’s genuinely learning something as a character. I don’t think he was just keeping that in his back pocket and tossing it on the table now. He’s been trying to conquer and force people forever. But being with the elves and watching how they do things and watching what’s effective, he sees another path and offers that up. Then that becomes the key that unlocks the entire thing.

McKay: I would go further, and here’s where I think we can tip our hats to Gennifer Hutchison who wrote quite a bit of this episode. The title of the episode is “Alloyed,” and there’s a rich metaphor there of things that don’t belong together being coaxed together, and complementing one another, and balancing one another. That’s very much what’s going on emotionally with Galadriel and Sauron. That’s his pitch. “If you and me do this together, you’ll balance my dark side, and I’ll give you the power that nobody wants to give you.” He’s pitching an alloy to her. And that’s what is happening with the rings.

Payne: Even the mithril itself, we’re saying, is a certain kind of alloy, because we tell this potentially apocryphal backstory about it. Whether people want to treat it as canon can or not, it’s this struggle between good and evil that was fused together in a moment of lightning. So even mithril has this sort of duality to it as well.

Tell me about the origin of that mithril myth. What was it? The song of… 

Payne: The Song of the Roots of Hithaeglir.

Tolkien never explained the origin of mithril, so having the characters say “this may be apocryphal” gave you permission to invent a little bit, right?

Payne: Definitely. Especially when you’re playing with such primordial elements of canon, like the Silmarils, mithril, the Balrog. You want to make sure that you’re giving yourself a little bit of wiggle room because people have obviously strong feelings canonically. 

We wanted to make sure that the rings themselves are invested with this otherworldly kind of power and energy. As they’re making it, it’s made with a special kind of process. But we wanted to put a little extra spice on top of that and say, “Does it actually have some kind of light that comes from beyond what mortal or even immortal beings could generate?”

McKay: Rings are the nuclear bomb in Middle-earth. It changes everything. Everyone needs a ring, everyone wants a ring. They become the ways that these different cultures are subdued. It creates immortality. Sauron’s ring creates the entire mythos. Everything is different from here. The One Ring defines everything for thousands and thousands of years. It defines the Second Age and the Third Age. And we’re just trying to find ways to invest the process of this creation with as much richness and meaning as possible.

The gold and silver they use also has a meaningful origin. They use the dagger that belonged to Galadriel’s brother.

McKay: There’s an emotional grounding we’re looking for too. Galadriel’s brother’s dagger is the symbol of her arc in season one. The small piece of mithril they get is Elrond’s journey in season one, and a symbol of his friendship that gets passed back and forth with [the dwarf prince] Durin. So we’re trying to invest it with as much magic as possible in an emotional way, in a way that feels like those rings come from something.

Did the melting of her brother’s dagger have some symbolism too? She’s aware now who Halbrand is and knows his role in the creation of these rings. Does losing the dagger represent her letting her guard down, and surrendering part of her beliefs?

McKay: It felt very emotional to us, and felt like a fulfillment of her letting go, her putting up her sword. It’s been the weapon she’s used at every turn. She put it to Adar’s throat. She put it to Sauron’s throat once he’s been unmasked. So it’s certainly rich with meaning for her as a character. The next step of her journey now will be confronting the ramifications of everything she did while she was carrying it.

Payne: If you look at the dagger, it has the two Trees of Valinor in it. There is Laurelin and Telperion and gold and silver that’s sort of baked into it. So that’s the symbol of her childhood. [Melting it] is this loss of primordial innocence. Surrendering that as part of what needs to happen in order to preserve the Elvin race. She’s letting go of the last remnant of her childhood in order to move forward.

The Three Witches

I wanted to ask you about the three witches who are hunting for Sauron. As they dissipate—I don’t think they are killed—we see them illuminated as skeletal figures, one with a crown, and they look very much like the Ringwraiths to me. Am I reading that the right way?

Payne: I think what you’re reading is, there are glimpses into the unseen world where the true form of something is revealed. You’re seeing what is underneath the form that they’ve been presenting. Were they defeated, or were they just temporarily vanquished? I think that’s a story point that people can be thinking about.

It reminded me of the Peter Jackson films, when Frodo puts on the One Ring and sees the Ringwraiths glowing in the same way.

Payne: That’s him seeing into the Unseen world. The ring takes you into that place where you can see the true form of things.

McKay: We’re riffing on the visual language of that. But also we like the idea that there are different forms of magic in Tolkien. The visual storytelling hopefully suggests that these witches are lesser conjurers than one of the wizards would be, and are bested here, but they escape in another form. Their true appearance in the world of the unseen is hideous and horrible and some kind of magic is making them beautiful. 

While the visual language is a little similar to the Nazgûl, we’re also thinking about Macbeth and we’re thinking about the old crones and the three witches and just trying to come up with something strange and weird. We know they come from Rhûn, and we know there are magic cults in Rhûn, which is one of the things Tolkien writes about. So maybe there’s a slightly different kind of magic and we can peel back the layers in future seasons. 

Goodbye, Stranger. It's Been Nice …

You don’t explicitly name the Stranger, but I feel like you give us all the information we need to know who he is. His final line in season one is “Always follow your nose,” which is a famous Gandalf line. To me, that felt like your way of saying, “Yes, this is Gandalf,” without saying, “Hi, I’m Gandalf!” 

McKay: He and Nori are going east. We know that the Blue Wizards go east. We know that Saruman has spent real time in the east. Certainly he says some things and does some things that feel very Gandalf-y. So the jury could still be out. 

This is a journey of discovery, and a name has not been a part of that yet. But if it feels by the end of season one like he’s a Tolkienian wizard developing a Tolkienian relationship with a Halfling that is akin to Gandalf and Frodo or Gandalf and Bilbo, I think we’d be very delighted. Is that fair to say, J.D.?

Payne: Absolutely. And the name, whatever it ends up being, will present itself at the time in which it feels like the wizard has earned it.

All right.

McKay: But it’s not a mystery so much as it’s a journey of self-discovery, and the name felt unimportant at this time. That’s it. We’re not saying anything more!

Reading the Room

We’ve talked so much about the creative element and the storytelling and the narrative, but there's lot of attention on this show. It’s a big show, it’s an important show for Amazon.

McKay: What do you mean? [Laughs.]

Now that you have viewer data from a complete season, how do you track success? Are you seeing ratings? Are you looking at reactions online? What were you able to learn from audience reaction that you found useful? 

Payne: There’s a lot of ways to answer that question. I’d say, you would probably have to ask Amazon what success looked like for them in terms of the business standpoint of things. They have a very complex way that they measure how viewership impacts the platform, and what their goals are, and all those things. For us as storytellers, success means people engaging with the material in a way that impacts them.

We receive notes from people that you say, “Hey, I got together and watched this with my family, and we haven’t had a reason to get together for a while, but this brought us together on Friday night.” And they say, “We were all talking about it for hours afterwards.”

It’s a thing that brings people together, whether it’s families or friends or groups of people who like Tolkien, or who like fantasy, or just like TV in general. There were moments people found very emotional, that move them in some way, or lines that they found meaning in. And each of those things was immensely gratifying.

Did any of that impact your work shaping season two?

Payne: In terms of how it’s impacted season two, we wrote most of season two before season one came out. We’re refining the last bits of it now as we’re starting to shoot. But really, the cake was kind of baked before the audience response came in. 

Certainly, you look at audience response, and you see what characters people love, and what kinds of storytelling moves them. I wouldn’t say we're over-correcting for any of it, but we’re certainly listening to people’s responses.

McKay: We’re in this for the long game. This show is a life project for us. We are married to it, and the bar couldn’t possibly be higher for what we want to achieve. Our blood, sweat, and tears are going into this every waking moment of our lives. We want this thing to be delightful and emotional and exciting and thrilling and surprising and heartbreaking and romantic and all the things you want from Lord of the Rings. 

So I think in some ways the audience response, we’re a year ahead of that because we saw it a year ago, and we were like, “Here it’s really seeming to work, and here it’s maybe not working as well as we might have hoped or thought it would.” So to the extent there’s a course correction, it’s just us building on the strengths of the show and on the strengths of our actors and our designers.

Was there a response that surprised you?  

McKay: A little bit. Other than the extremes, which can be very loud—whether it’s people who are like love, love, love, or people who hate, hate, hate—generally, when you sift through the noise, I think we feel that people see the same show we do. And the things we love, they love. And the things we know maybe, “Oh, we got away with it there. We’ve got to do better next time,” were things people called us on.