Next month, audiences will be taken back to Middle-earth for the first time since The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies released in theaters in 2014. However, one thing remained consistent for The Lord of the Rings and the prequel trilogy: Director Peter Jackson. For Prime Video’s interpretation, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will have an entirely different cast and crew. Jackson did an excellent job adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s work from page to script with his trilogies, and the Rings of Power team will have a daunting task ahead of them if they want to live up to the previous work.
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The Rings of Power will be in an entirely different age from the main stories of Middle-earth, taking audiences to the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. This era included several notable events, including the story of Númenor, an ancient kingdom of Men, and the rise and fall of Sauron, the main antagonist seen throughout Tolkien’s work. The show will also include the forging of the 20 rings from which the series gets its name.
During an interview with CBC, a few actors from The Rings of Power share what you can expect to see from their characters when the series arrives next month, on Sept 2. Maxim Baldry, who plays Isildur, says his character will be at a crossroads during the show’s premiere. Isildur is the man we meet at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. He has the chance to destroy the ring once and for all at Mt. Doom; however, its pull is too powerful for the man to give up.
Fans will be excited to explore a character who was so crucial to The Lord of the Rings story while hardly grabbing any screen time in the original trilogies. In addition, it will be interesting to see how Baldry portrays a character who is so important, yet his performance through the mainline movies will be hard to pull from.
“You meet Isildur at a crossroads. He wants to fulfill his fathers dream and become like a ships captain. But he also wants to explore the world and find himself, which I think a lot of young people do and want to do. He leaves a little bit of a path of destruction wherever he goes, always annoying his sister - but there’s an undercurrent of sadness with the family because they’re also dealing with the death of their mother and father’s wife.”
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“The exciting part for me is that there are these signposts on the way that Tolkien has written, but he hasn’t actually fleshed out these characters to the extent that the other characters are in The Lord of the Rings books. And so, just being given the opportunity to begin to imagine what he might be like, personify what he might sound like. I’m just very excited to as to where this character goes because he has to get to Middle-earth at some point, perhaps we think. And forge the last alliance of elves and men, so that journey arc is an exciting one to go one.”
