The season one finale of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power arrived right now, together with an enormous reveal that… okay, look, each little bit of it is a spoiler, so proceed at your individual danger.

If you’ve been following all of the fan theories about The Rings of Power, you probably weren’t or is not going to be shocked to be taught that Halbrand is actually the Dark Lord Sauron, as many had already surmised. How you are feeling about this twist (or how properly/poorly it was arrange) is in fact as much as you, however the Hollywood Reporter has a really fascinating interview with Charlie Vickers, who performs the character, wherein the actor reveals he had no thought he was enjoying the Lord of the Rings’ greatest (and shape-shifting) antagonist till a number of episodes in:

“I didn’t know for sure until the beginning of the third episode. We filmed the first two episodes and then the show went on hiatus because of covid. Toward the end of the hiatus, the showrunners sat me down and told me. I filmed that sequence on the raft not knowing. I filmed it as Halbrand wholeheartedly. But I did have an inkling, if I’m honest with you. My last two auditions were [reading lines from] Richard III and we know he’s not the greatest guy in the world. And then the other [audition lines were] from Paradise Lost where you’re literally giving the speech as Satan. So that gave me an inkling there was something up.”

As clues go, that’s fairly stable, however Eru Ilúvatar is aware of The Rings of Power dropped a number of extra apparent ones by way of the sequence’ inaugural 9 episodes.

I extremely advocate giving the entire interview a learn in case you’re so inclined, as Vickers talks an important deal about Halbrand/Sauron’s motivations for a few of his surprising actions within the first season, that are fascinating to be taught. What I’m most enthusiastic about is that apparently we’ll be taught why the Dark Lord caught himself on a ramshackle raft in the midst of the Sundering Seas in season two, as a result of it bugs me immensely.

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