Trivia / The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

• Ability over Appearance: An acknowledged part of the multi-ethnic nature of the cast is a casting that favoured the better candidates of all ethnicities as opposed to sticking with Caucasian actors only. Outside of that aspect, Galadriel is described in the books as a Statuesque Stunner, the tallest of Elf women and as tall as her husband Celeborn, himself already tall for a male Elf and the males being no less than six and a half feet in height. This stands in contrast to Morfydd Clark's own lithe physique (standing at just 5'3/1,61 cm), but her performance leaves no doubt as to her importance to the role.
• Acting in the Dark: Halbrand's actor Charlie Vickers didn't know the real nature of his character until he began filming episode 3, but suspected it up to some degree. He was asked to read passages from Paradise Lost and Richard III for his audition, giving him the hint his character might have a dark side.
• Actor-Inspired Element: Charlie Vickers declared he took a Homelander approach to play Sauron.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Japanese dub, and while also being a voice actress by her own right, Marigold Brandyfoot is voiced by the also movie actress Takako Fuji, better known for non-Japanese audiences for playing Kayako Saeki in Ju On.
• Content Leak:
  • Somewhere in the middle of July 2022, someone working in the Amazon crew leaked details about the plot on 4chan.
  • First leaks about the setting and possible plotlines in the season 2 appeared as early as October 2022 on Fellowship of Fans. By January 2023, first leaks about the official plotlines and which characters new actors will play were already out.
• Darkhorse Casting: It's telling that the "biggest" names in the cast are up-and-coming actors — Cynthia Addai-Robinson (of Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Arrow fame), Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), Morfydd Clark (The Personal History of David Copperfield, Dracula and His Dark Materials) and Robert Aramayo (a younger Ned Stark in a few episodes of Game of Thrones and as motorcycling pioneer Bill Harley in Harley and the Davidsons). There's also perhaps Lenny Henry (Chef! (1993)) for British viewers, and Simon Merrells, who was the deliveryman for the Four Horsemen in Good Omens (2019) and was also featured as Marcus Crassus in Spartacus.
• Dawson Casting: Setting aside elvish immortality, Galadriel's actress Morfydd Clark is seven years younger than Benjamin Walker who plays Gil-galad, her character's grandnephew.
• Deleted Scene: There was a scene filmed that would have revealed Durin IV's name, but it was cut in the last minute because the showrunners later decided the episode's runtime was already too long.
• Dueling Works: The series premiered in 2022, two weeks after another high profile Fantasy Series in the post-Game of Thrones landscape, House of the Dragon. Both also happen to be prequels set hundreds of years before a main saga / main Myth Arc. The duel carries over for Season 2 of both series in 2024.
• Fake Brit: The show adopted similar accents to the movies for the English dialects of Middle-earth, therefore having actors of different backgrounds faking the British accents.
  • There are many Aussies and Kiwis in the show: Fabian McCallum (with a hint of Welsh for the Elves), Charlie Vickers (RP accent), Tyroe Muhafidin and Geoff Morrell as well Kiwi actor Ian Blackburn doing a Northern English accent and Markella Kavenagh (West Country accent for the Harfoots).
  • Americans: Benjamin Walker as Gil-galad, Ema Horvath and Cynthia Addai-Robinson having RP accent.
• Fake Scot: Owain Arthur is a Welsh actor and does Scottish accent for Prince Durin.
• Flip-Flop of God: There are conflicting statements from the producers about Middle-earth being a representation of modern-day world or simply a fantasy world without ulterior parallelisms. Both lines of argumentation can be found regarding the casting choices, the usage of political allegory and the debate around the perceived Irish stereotypes in the hobbits.
• Meaningful Release Date: The series debuted on September 2, 2022, the 49th anniversary of J. R. R. Tolkien's death.
• The Other Darrin: Joseph Mawle announced in December 2022 that he wouldn't be returning for Season 2, with it being announced shortly after that Adar would be portrayed by Sam Hazeldine in subsequent seasons.
• On-Set Injury: No less than 3 stunt actors suffered severe injuries while filming for the show.
  • Stunt performer Dana Grunt suffered serious head injury that developed into a brain aneurysm. Rumors are that she accidented herself after being forced to make stunts she was not comfortable with, probably because they were not safe enough. Thankfully, she got a brain-surgery and is fine is present.
  • Another one, Alyssa Cadwell ended up with a head injury after striking a bolt while filming for Galadriel's water scenes. She was paid 500,000 dollars by Amazon for her hospital expenses.
  • And the last stunt double was Thomas Kiwi, who got his right shoulder seriously injured after performing backflips with an improper support wire system. After his injury, he retired from the production and warned them to be more careful with the safety of the stunt performers.
• The Other Marty: Tom Budge was originally cast as Celebrimbor, and filmed scenes for several episodes, but after production halted he was recast with Charles Edwards.
• Production Posse: The Rings of Power has involved in its production many of the big names that were behind the creation of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. New Line Cinema is involved in the production of the show just as it was with the trilogies, Howard Shore produced the intro, Jed Brophy, who portrayed Orc Sharku and other random orcs in the Lord of the Rings and the Dwarf Nori in The Hobbit, plays an orc in the show too, WETA is handling the CGI department, and John Howe serves as conceptual designer chief like he did in the movies. Amazon almost had Peter Jackson involved too.
• Promoted Fanboy: Bear McCreary has been a long time fan of Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, and had read Tolkien since he was 10 years old. After the movies got out, he declared that he could only hope one day to work on a such project too. He finally got his wishes granted once he was asked to compose the score for the TV series.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: No Adaptations Allowed still applies for Third Age material from the Legendarium (the era covered in The Lord of the Rings and the Peter Jackson movie adaptations), hence the series being set in the Second Age. However, Amazon apparently doesn't own the rights to adapt any material from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth series, Tolkien's collected Letters, or any other later books of his material (i.e. the overwhelming majority of First and Second Age material) either. They only have rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and thus they're basically relying on the tiny fraction of First and Second Age material referenced within The Lord of the Rings, the bulk of which are in its Appendices (the show even credits The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices separately). As stated by the showrunners:
  J.D. Payne: We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.
  Patrick McKay: There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to. As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • Both Morfydd Clark and Amelie Child-Villiers bear a striking resemblance to each other as they play adult and child version of Galadriel. And despite the show taking place into a different continuity, is not too far stretched to believe that their resemblance to Cate Blanchett played an important role in casting them as Galadriel.
  • While, as mentioned previously, the series is in a different continuity from the Peter Jackson movies, Daniel Weyman◊ as The Stranger is so incredibly convincing as a young Ian McKellen that many viewers guessed his true identity from Weyman's appearance alone. When he gets a chance to speak in complete sentences in the finale, he also utterly nails the other actor's mannerisms.
• Troubled Production: Filming of the first season in New Zealand was stopped for several months in 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. The series was one of seven film and television productions that were granted exemptions to allow cast and crew members to enter the country while its borders were closed to non-New Zealanders due to the pandemic (no doubt because the previous Middle-earth inspired works — the Peter Jackson films — had provided much publicity and jobs there).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Apparently, Peter Jackson was asked to collaborate on the production, but Amazon eventually worked on it without him. Jackson made clear that he doesn't consider this a snub and is interested in watching the show from a "perfectly neutral" perspective. Allegedly the Tolkien Estate demanded him not to be included due to Christopher Tolkien's negative feelings about Jackson's trilogy.
    Peter Jackson: They asked me if I wanted to be involved — [writer-producer Fran Walsh] and I — and I said, "That's an impossible question to answer without seeing a script." So they said, "As soon as we get the first couple scripts, we'll send them to you." And the scripts never showed up.
  • In 2017, the Tolkien Estate decided they were selling TV rights and entertained pitches from HBO, Netflix and Amazon. HBO wanted to retell the Third Age and Netflix wanted to start a Tolkien-universe akin to Marvel's with multiple products, such as a Gandalf series and an Aragorn drama. Both approaches were rejected and Amazon, who wasn't the highest bidder, won not with a specific pitch, but with a pledge of a close relationship that would give the estate a creative seat at the table.
• You Sound Familiar: In the Japanese dub, Mitsuru Miyamoto, who previously voiced Faramir in the trilogy's live-action films, now voices Celebrimbor.

---