‘Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’s JD Payne & Patrick McKay On Their Deep Dive Into Tolkien Mythology For Season 2 Of Epic Amazon Series
It’s easy when writing about Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to place focus on it rivaling the budget devoted to any TV series, ever. But what are showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne delivering that makes the continuation of the JRR Tolkien mythology worthwhile? Season 2 has just arrived on Prime Video, and a viewing of the first three episodes shows a storytelling ambition that points to a deep love of Tolkien mythology that gives the show a template different from Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning LOTR trilogy. And also a storytelling runway that can stretch as long as the one that powered Game of Thrones and its spinoffs. Here, McKay and Payne take a deep dive into the mix of Middle-earth storytelling and spectacle, and their deep love of Tolkien’s world creation.
DEADLINE: You guys have been writing partners for 25 years. How did that begin, and what does involvement in the writing of Star Trek Beyond and some of these others prepare you for such a world creation exercise like the LOTR series? You stepped into big shoes here, and put your stamp on Tolkien’s Middle-earth so it has the touchstones without feeling like a regurgitation of what Peter Jackson did.
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JD PAYNE: That’s a huge compliment. Star Trek Beyond helped us in a couple of ways. We were very close to the production and really started to see how the sausage gets made and how we would do it, if and when we were lucky to have it be our turn. And we worked with Bad Robot, with Lindsey Weber, who ran JJ Abrams’ film department. We invited her to run off to Middle-earth with us, and she has been a key of everything we do creatively.
PATRICK MCKAY: As for how we met, JD and I were on the debate team in high school, and we would put on plays at our high school and wrote together. I went to Stonehill College and then when I was at Stonehill College and he was at Yale, I would take the train down or he’d take it up. We wrote screenplays all through college so what you see now, the incubation project started then.
DEADLINE: As I watched the journey of the confused character The Stranger, who I assume is Gandalf, the desolation and desert scenes reminded me of Star Wars as much as LOTR, as you broaden the landscape. Tell us how you feel you stepped up your game after a first season that needed to establish the characters and the stakes.
MCKAY: When we got started writing screenplays together, it was the tail end of Generation X. We grew up immersed in all those great Spielberg, Lucas, Amblin, Star Wars, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters. When Peter Jackson’s films came out, we absolutely fell in love with them, it was one of the few franchises in the last 25 years that we loved the way we loved the stuff we grew up with. That all feeds into it and our love of epic drama. We also love those classic Hollywood costume dramas, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Ben-Hur, Spartacus and Barry Lyndon.
PAYNE: You mentioned deserts. Lawrence Arabia, definitely something we talked about a lot in the room.
MCKAY: You mentioned with Star Trek; we’re very fortunate that our tastes run toward these big world-building, hopefully immersive, commercial ideas with an emotional core. That turned out to be the key that unlocked the door. We worked on a whole bunch of franchises and a lot of stuff at Bad Robot, but we were always chasing the white whale of wanting to really be the people building it from the ground up, not just the writers for hire or the rewriter as we were on many projects. And when Lord of the Rings came around, we chased it with everything we had. Then we discovered what a challenge it is, the craft that goes into bringing that world to life. Every costume, every beard, every Har-foot, trying to reach the highest bar for people love The Lord of the Rings so much.
That made it not just genre fantasy filmmaking, but the highest Hollywood art. Those Peter Jackson films were not just blockbusters, they were mega Oscar winners. We went into it with a little bit of naivety and just a love for the material and enthusiasm. We made a first season that we’re hugely proud of that was very successful for Amazon, but we made it in the middle of a pandemic. It was like racing in the Indy 500 in the middle of a rainstorm. We were very, very, very lucky that Amazon was so happy with how it turned out. They launched us right into a second season.
PAYNE: In terms of how we’ve tried to raise our game, we like to say that the season goes broader, deeper and bigger. And in that we’re going to more worlds. We’re expanding the map, going deeper in that the character journey that is more psychologically complex. The story of Sauron and Celebrimbor…
DEADLINE: The Elf lord who Sauron gets to forge his rings of power…
PAYNE: The Sauron and Celebrimbor story is this sort of psychological thriller where you’re watching Sauron [played by Charlie Vickers] seduce, manipulate and ultimately gaslight Celebrimbor [Charles Edwards]. Psychologically, it’s more complex than Season 1, and bigger just in the scope of it. There’s a creature around every corner. We’ve got Barrow-wights, and ents, and trolls. All these Tolkien creatures plus a couple that we’ve come up with, and then a battle that takes three episodes that goes from beginning to end. It’s just an enormous season. We’ve raised our game in every department and we’ll see how the fans receive it.
DEADLINE: It does seem like the Season of Sauron, who seduced and deceived Galadriel [Morfydd Clark] through the first season. We learn through flashback of his attempt to do the same with the Orcs lord Adar [Joseph Mawle]. Describe how he evolves and drives this whole thing with his deception, seduction and sleight of hand…
MCKAY: Charlie Vickers is an actor we found in Australia. He’d done a bunch of things but had never had the opportunity to really hit the fastball. We knew we had very great long-term ambitions for this character and that he would have all these layers. Sauron had to be a villain, but unlike other villains, he’s a deceiver. He wants to conquer the world, but he’s going to do it by taking advantage and turning others to his own ends, which is quite unique, especially when you think about Lord of the Rings. The image in our heads is masses of purely evil, faceless zombie armies attacking people. But Sauron, as Tolkien originally depicted and conceived him, is quite complex. He’s a fallen God in a way, a lesser God, so to speak, a fallen angel. And we from the very beginning thought about John Milton’s Paradise Lost and that depiction of Satan. In fact, Charlie auditioned with a piece from Paradise Lost, for Sauron. This is his season, and he sees himself as the hero, even though he’s evil and wrong in the eyes of the audience. That can make for very compelling viewing. And we wanted to start the season with, we almost called it The Ides of March, the blood origin story of Sauron’s rise, crawling from the depths. We wanted it to be really cinematic and really immersive and we wanted to pull the viewer into his psychology and point of view. I have to say, we’re really proud of the results. Charlotte Brandstrom, our producing director on this season, thinks so cinematically and so dramatically and really knocked that out of the park.
DEADLINE: That Sauron blood scene is crazy and cinematic. His seduction and destruction of Celebrimbor preys on the vanity of the ring maker, who never got the credit his ancestor Feanor did for creating the Silmaril gems, which comes from a different Tolkien tale. Tell us about that courtship and betrayal, and where the One Ring fits here, the one that ended up in the hands of Gollum, Bilbo and Frodo.
PAYNE: First of all, just say I’m impressed that someone who stepped into this for a colleague knows the lore. Maybe you’re just a super fan and you’ve been spending years doing this or you’ve done your research, but good on you…
DEADLINE: Well let’s just say I could sing with you right now, all the Led Zeppelin songs Robert Plant wrote that delve into Gollum, the Misty Mountains, all that stuff. I read all the books in college. I’m a hopeless Tolkien groupie, I guess…
PAYNE: That’s awesome. We’re very fortunate with that start line to have both Charlie Vickers and Charlie Edwards, each very different actors, but each firing on all cylinders this season. Start with Charlie Edwards. He comes off as so likable with this charming, reserved manner about him, but he’s also ambitious. As you said, one of his ancestors created the greatest artwork ever. He’s got that anxiety and ambition influencing him to need to do something that matter. He wants to create something that’s beautiful, something that’s going to bring healing and beauty into Middle-earth. That’s where Sauron is able to get him. As Patrick was saying, what’s so scary about Sauron is he doesn’t just see your weaknesses, he uses them to go for the jugular. He actually sees your desire to do good, your strengths, and is able to twist those to his evil ends. He sees this ambition in Celebrimbor and says, alright, that’s where I’m going to get him. And very slowly does this seductive identity striptease where he’s like, well, you thought you knew who I was. You thought I was a human, but ultimately I’m actually this messenger from the gods and I’m here to unlock your greatest abilities. I think for any us, it’s this Faustian bargain where if someone appears in the form of an angel of light and says, look, I can give you all your dreams and make your greatest ambitions come true, that’s a tempting offer. And Celebrimbor bites on the hook.
DEADLINE: We see them making those rings from gold, and Sauron placing himself between Celebrimbor to drop in the key ingredient, and you can feel the sleight of hand and Sauron inserting the influence that will make those wearing the rings beholden to him, which drives the epic The Lord of the Rings novels.
MCKAY: In some ways this whole season is the origin story for how Sauron earned that title. As for the One Ring you mentioned, I don’t want to just dodge that; I would just say that it is the center of the mythology and is going to be a hugely important part of the show. But not just yet.
DEADLINE: When you set out on this series, what rules did you establish on sticking to Tolkien’s texts, and veering from them?
MCKAY: I would say is we are absolutely reverent and we love Tolkien and I grew up with those books and they were so important to us. We love this world, we love Middle-earth, we love those texts. And we chose to tell a story in this particular era of Middle-earth’s history because he never wrote a fixed version of it. He wrote notes and a little timeline over here and there’s a little article over there, and sometimes they contradict one another. I think we ask for forgiveness more than permission in the sense of we think there could be an epic version of this story in this era that feels like the things you want to feel when you watch Lord of the Rings, that has the adventure and the propulsion and the tension and the set pieces and world-building and also politics and psychology as JD says.
I think while being reverent toward the tone and the themes and the spirit and the major narrative turns of the piece, we’re really trying to create an absolutely gripping and fun and thrilling television show. And that’s really the god we pray to. We would never sacrifice the core themes, ideas, or the heart of the work for television, but we want this to be an entertaining ride, not just for super fans who know all the Robert Plant lyrics … but I always like to say for my mother who never understood Lord of the Rings, tried to read it, didn’t get it, tried to watch the movies and said, I don’t know, huh? We want it to be a thoroughly entertaining show. And I think at the end of the day, that’s sort of where we place our chips.
DEADLINE: Take us through the different races in Middle-earth and what you do in Season 2 with them. It was fascinating how you made the Orcs more than the killer zombies as you described them. Under Adar, this is a race that wants to live in their version of peace. We see one of Adar’s lieutenants who doesn’t want war, then turns to his mate and they’ve got a baby. They’re more than just instruments to be commanded to wipe out men, elves and dwarves. So, start there with the Orcs.
PAYNE: From the beginning of this season, we talked about the idea of having with an arc, and we feel like this goes straight back to Tolkien. You read the books and you get these blips of moments where orcs are kind of on their own and they’re saying, Hey, what if one day there could be a place just for us, we could have our own little land or our own little cottage by the sea, so to speak, where they have dreams, they have aspirations, they don’t just want to be mindless killing machines. We tried to take that a step further and continue to individuate them and dramatize what their desires and ambitions might be. And we were also always fascinated by the idea that the orcs are fallen elves. Tolkien has this idea that evil can’t create anything, it can only corrupt. That the elves, these amazing, beautiful creatures could be corrupted into the orcs was fascinating to us. And so the idea of Adar as the missing link between the two to get his story as who he was as an elf and how and why he was turned, and then to see where that could lead him in terms of being the father of an entire race, that felt really compelling to us. We get some of those answers filled in for us this season and then get to see how again, those benevolent desires can ultimately lead to tragic ends.
MCKAY: I would just add that even when we were writing movies, I think JD and I, we spend an enormous amount of time and put an enormous amount of thought into our villains. Just going back to Hitchcock, this line that I love that he said in some interview where he talked about the movies he was most proud of. It was always because he had the most compelling villains and he pointed to Claude Rains in Notorious, as this Nazi hiding in South America. He’s absolutely evil, but you understand what’s motivating him, which makes him not less scary, but more scary sometimes. Villains are motivated by things that in their own heads make them think they’re the hero of their own story. And that can make for really compelling drama. And so orcs who have dimension, who have things they care about, benefits all the stories in our mind.
DEADLINE: Season 1 has this explosion of a volcano engineered by Adar that blackened a whole part of the land and made it possible for orcs to dwell in daylight. I don’t remember that in the book. Who thought it up and how much of a eureka moment was that in the writers room?
PAYNE: That’s a great question. Patrick, I don’t know if you remember, but I recall we’re all there around a table and the hockey puck gets passed back and forth so much that by the end, everyone has touched it. Patrick, if you remember more specifically than that, you can say it, but…
MCKAY: No. We worked with a murderer’s row of all of these great writers from prestige television. Jason Cahill worked on The Sopranos. Genny Hutchinson was in the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul rooms, Helen Shang worked on Hannibal. We have this incredible group of writers and that first season, we were looking for a major centerpiece moment that we hoped would kind of brand the show and really blow people’s minds. And we wanted to show people things they’d never seen on television. We liked the idea that maybe Mordor was not always Mordor. And there’s evidence in the texts about Mordor, and the volcano reawakening and then going dormant again for centuries. That felt like really fertile terrain. What if there are characters who are living in a beautiful place and they don’t realize it’s Mordor and the volcano reawakens while they’re there and it forever changes the landscape? That brought us around to the idea of, well, how do you trigger a volcano? True story, Genny Hutchison’s father is a geologist, and if water is introduced into volcanic heat very rapidly, it causes an explosion. And then the minute that idea kicked around the table between all of us and all these writers and the text and actual science, that card went up on the bulletin board very quickly.
DEADLINE: A good day in the writers room?
MCKAY: Yes, one of many good days.
DEADLINE: What about the crises facing elves, dwarves and men in Season 2?
PAYNE: Okay. Season 1, the elves face this existential crisis where their light is fading. And it’s just sort of an obscure Tolkien idea that even though the elves are immortal, they can still fade under the weight and weariness of immortality and the evil of the world. We wanted to figure out a way to dramatize that. And so trees are so important, and Tolkien came up with the idea of the great tree that could visually demonstrate the fading of the elves. They’re in a really terrible Catch-22, damned if you do and damned if you don’t. At the start of this season, they now have procured the means to halt the fading, with the three rings that build on Tolkien’s mythology of the Third Age. This is a window into how we piece these things together.
In the Third Age, we learned that the outcomes of the war of the ring were bad for the elves. Because once the One Ring is destroyed, it renders their elves’ rings inert, which means they’re going to fade and have to leave Middle-earth. So we were like, okay, if their rings have been what was keeping Middle-earth alive, what if they realized they were fading, earlier on? And then the rings were a solution to that problem. That was the backwards math we did from the Third Age to the Second Age. So now we are at this pivotal moment where they have the rings they know can save them, but they don’t know if they can use them because as Elrond rightly says, what if Sauron built some kind of backdoor into it that would allow him to have some leg up on us? This could be compromising and dangerous and reason to not use them and we’d have to go home. We could be powering our enemy even more. So that’s the crisis the elves are facing.
MCKAY: For the dwarves, it all goes back to the volcano. That initial environmental destruction has far-reaching effects. The geological impact caused earthquakes in Khazad-dum that have shut the sources of light, which are preventing the dwarves from growing food. And they find they need a magical solution to that existential crisis. So now they’re on the hook for Sauron’s ability to make more rings…
PAYNE: It puts their King in an uncomfortable place because in Season 1, he was the one who said that valor has determined long ago the fates of all of our various peoples. If it’s the elf’s time to go, we got to let him go. And now he’s going to eat his own words because he’s presented with a similar crisis. He has to decide, what will I do when I have to decide between taking a ring and folding up shop? So that’s the crisis this season. And then men. Yeah. Patrick, do you want to talk about the men a little bit?
MCKAY: We have our island kingdom of Numenor, which is the great Atlantis myth of Tolkien’s mythology. It’s the greatest kingdom of men that ever existed, but that eventually falls into civil war. And this season’s really about watching that ideological division and polarization and gap widen. We’ve got a power struggle for the throne, and you have the consequent splitting of the people into two factions and all the consequences that flow from that.
PAYNE: And we should say it makes them ripe for eventual further manipulation by Sauron, which we will see going forward. People who know the canon know where the Numenor story is going.
MCKAY: Yes, that’s true. And we’ve got Isildur, who we see in one of the very early scenes with an Elrond flashback in Lord of the Rings about the susceptibility of men to seduction and corruption by Sauron.
PAYNE: That’s the core of the show. Rather than taking that for granted, let’s really explore it. What kind of a life would someone lead that would lead them to make that fateful choice, and bring you on that journey? And for Isildur in Season 1, all he wanted to do was get away from home. He was the sort of restless, aimless youth. Now, Season 2, all he wants to do is get back home. He’s growing up, he’s maturing and he’s losing things along the way, and you’re watching layer by layer as we’re hopefully building a character with the potential for that kind of tragedy.
DEADLINE: I watched three episodes and you’ve thrown in the tree Ents, Shelob, trolls and undersea monsters, and it looks like a Balrog encounter looms ahead. You say you’ve created your own creatures. What should we hang onto our hats for?
MCKAY: I would speak sort of broadly while JD thinks of a more specific answer, but as we talked about a little earlier, we really wanted to up our game in the craft categories. The show is so ambitious, and Kristian Milsted, our production designer. We did massive new builds, practical builds for every world and every kingdom. I mean, Khazad-dum is huge for creature use. Our visual effects supervisor, Jason Smith, who is in our estimation truly a genius, we really wanted to go deeper into the flora and fauna. We wanted to bring these creatures to life. We wanted to take a new approach, down to costumes and crowd work and wanting every world to have its own color palette and tone. And Luca Mosca, who does our costumes, crushed it this season. And I think and hope that people feel that we got even more on screen this time even for being a show, that a lot of times when people talk about this show, they talk about the scope of it or the ambition of it, or God forbid, numbers and budgets. But we really feel like Season 2, the visuals speak for themselves. And that’s because of our amazing collaborators.
PAYNE: I’ll add onto that just in terms of answer your question about surprise, I don’t know that we create the creatures with the intent of surprise so much as the intent of just putting you in a place that only Middle-earth can put you. And just one that I’ll hang a lantern on in terms of the experience we had as we went from concepts all the way through finishing. I think when we first saw the final render of the Ent, it’s not about surprise as much as about wonder. And we all suddenly felt like children again, looking up at this living, breathing feeling being who is played amazingly voiced by Olivia Williams and then Jim Broadbent as well, right beside her. And the two of them bring just a sense of wisdom and agelessness and pathos to these tree creatures. And I think the first time we saw them, our breath was completely taken away and we were really excited for audiences to be able to see them as well.
DEADLINE: Peter Jackson invited me and my son to come to Wellington a few years back. We find ourselves following him around, as this always barefoot man tripped over and around the actual miniatures that were made for the LOTR movies. We’re looking at Minas Tirith, Sauron’s castle and all the geographical landmarks we’d seen in the trilogy, and we’re gobsmacked. He has them all, because back then they had to be built. I look at these magnificent stone-carved architectural landmarks that define the great cities of Middle-earth that you’ve put in Season 2, and I wonder: What does doing it with VFX and computers give you that Jackson didn’t have, in terms of efficiency and ability to take the ambition even further than when he had to film the miniatures?
MCKAY: That is a fantastic question. We come to this as fans of genre, of classic cinema, and we are as guilty as anybody of the last couple decades complaining about the over-reliance on digital. We were determined from minute one to bring Middle-earth to life in front of a camera, not just in ones and zeros. And because of that, we did many huge builds for Season 1, and even more in Season 2. So you have actors on practical physical sets that are 360, but you’re never going to be able to build whole cities and whole worlds. And what we found in doing a deep dive on a sweeping shot over Numenor, what are the advantages and disadvantages? What if we built a mini Numenor, or what if we built a massive Numenor in a computer?
And what we found was the technology has become so advanced and so sophisticated that you’re never going to be able to match the quality and complexity of a digital image with a physical prop. And what you end up doing is replacing a lot of it. Anyway, that was not the case 25 years ago when Peter started making those films; his use of physical and digital and the handshake between them was so sophisticated and so unprecedented, it had never been done before. We are now doing a different version of that handshake, where the sets are huge and they extend in every direction. And so you’re hopefully constantly switching between a digital effect and a physical effect so that somewhere you lose sense of the magic trick. But what we found is now a digital city is actually not just faster and more efficient, but you’re going to end up there anyway because you’re going to be augmenting and fixing any version of a miniature.
DEADLINE: Was there something you built that was very expensive, and prompt the call from Amazon’s Jennifer Salke saying, guys, how do I explain this overage to Jeff Bezos? We know this is the most fiscally ambitious series we’ve ever seen, but has there been that friction?
MCKAY: Just so I understand the question, are you saying where we imagined something massive and Amazon pushed back budget-wise, and we needed to turn the whale into a dolphin, so to speak?
DEADLINE: Yep.
PAYNE: We’re very fortunate that Amazon gets the scope and ambition of what it takes to bring Middle-earth to life. Tolkien’s imagination is vast, and we’re lucky that they are fans as well as the studio. They’ve been very supportive and I think we’ve been fairly self-policing in that department in as much as we know what our resources are. We get our scripts early enough that we can really start to run them through the machine and see where the pain points are, then start to cut back where we need to. And we’ve had a really just positive relationship with the studio did the entire time along. Patrick, do you have anything to add there?
MCKAY: Yeah, no, what I would say, and thank you Mike, for coming at this question in such a tactful way, because we get worse versions of this question. What I would say is this: JD and I came as writers in television. The writer is the showrunner, director, producer, all of the above. But to give credit to some of our other collaborators, our lead non-writing EP on this show is Lindsey Weber, who, as JD mentioned earlier, was the head of film at Bad Robot, and other producers with experience on big shows and films. No matter how fancy or big it may look, no matter how fancy or expensive some in the press might claim, no matter what you’re making, it is always a balance, and time is a resource that you cannot buy.
You constantly are trying to figure out a way to get every dollar on the screen in the most spectacular way possible. And the only way to do that is smart producing. As people with great courtside seats, I think this show is one of the most complex and ambitious productions that is produced in an exceedingly responsible way that exists out there right now. There are only a few big-ticket franchises like this that are doing what we’re doing and getting it all on screen. That points to a healthy and positive relationship with our studio. They are collaborators and our partners. And so friction is the wrong word, but friction could be good as well in really deciding what are the battles to pick.
DEADLINE: It’s clear from Season 1 and the three Season 2 episodes I watched that you have a storytelling runway that can be as long as the one that David Benioff and DB Weiss had for Game of Thrones. You must have this mapped out in your heads. How many seasons do you need to tell this story and stick the landing?
PAYNE: What I would say is from the very beginning, we were so fortunate that Amazon took a chance on us and gave us the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, creatively. How we got that job was, we presented a story with a beginning, middle and end. And we were able to do that because it’s not our story. We are merely stewards. This is Tolkien’s story, part of his mythology, and this Second Age has a very particular trajectory, arc, and a very clear ending. And I think we just hope to continue to be fortunate and have this big audience and be able to keep making this grand ambitious show because there’s great stuff yet to come.
DEADLINE: That was gracefully evasive.
MCKAY: Mike, I’ll try to be one degree more specific. We’re fortunate in that Tolkien gave us the big guideposts in terms of when certain kingdoms fall, how they fall, who some of the biggest players are, what their tragic flaws are. We have a plan with the characters, like Isildur. What are the various things that you take away along the way? What are the tragedies you put them through that would lead to the place where Isildur is going to keep the ring? There are thoughts like that for many of the characters and especially the canonical ones. That said, we also leave room for discovery. That’s one of the joys of creation. And especially when you’re collaborating with each one of our collaborators as we have.
We talk to our VFX supervisor Jason Smith, and say, what are you excited about doing Season 2? He said, creatures, let’s do more creatures. And so we really talked about what kind of creatures are we going to bring in? How are they going to fit into the narrative? And we have conversations like that with all of our department heads and with our actors as well. They’re making discoveries about the characters as they’re playing them. So there’s also room for different storylines to expand or contract for us to take diversions we weren’t necessarily planning on because they are too delicious not to take. But all that said, we have the major signposts along the way and we know where we’re going.
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