For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our article interviewing Gennifer Hutchison and Justin Doble about Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power from Backstory Magazine’s issue 47 – now available to read! This is not the full article – so, if you enjoy what you’ve read in this free excerpt – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by by subscribing to Backstory Magazine so you can read the rest of the piece and so much more!
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Gennifer Hutchison and Justin Doble travel to Middle-earth
By Danny Munso
The key creative choice for season one made early on by Payne and McKay had to do with Sauron, the major antagonist in Tolkien’s work. At this point in the author’s timeline, the shapeshifting Sauron is hiding in Middle-earth, presenting himself as a human. In Tolkien’s writings, this takes the form of a man named Annatar, who helps create the Rings of Power while forging his own One Ring in secret. In the show—as viewers know—Sauron is disguising himself as Halbrand, a twist that isn’t revealed until the season-one finale and comes as a shock to Galadriel, who has formed a bond with Halbrand, who has himself secretly been her mortal enemy the entire time. But the writers took great care to hide Sauron’s identity as well as they could throughout the first season, which included presenting several other characters as red herrings. “We didn’t want it to be completely obvious,” Hutchison says, “but we did hope they would speculate, because that’s really fun. We were careful to make sure that if you went back and rewatched every choice Halbrand made, you could also see why Sauron is making that choice and that they weren’t contradictory. It’s really important you can really read both characters in every decision they made.”
Hutchison penned two of the crucial Galadriel/Sauron scenes in the season: the one in which they meet and—alongside Payne and McKay—the reveal in the finale. When the pair meet, Galadriel is adrift at sea and comes across the survivors of a shipwreck, who are then attacked by a sea monster. Only Galadriel and Halbrand survive until they are rescued in the next episode by Elendil’s ship. That episode, titled “Adrift,” contains multiple conversations between Galadriel and Halbrand that can be looked at a different way once you know Halbrand’s actual identity. He even notes that “looks can be deceiving.” Hutchison approached the scene as if she was writing for Halbrand, a new character as far as Tolkien fans were concerned. “I really enjoyed writing those scenes between them in the beginning, because it’s really fun to introduce a character but also introduce them in the context of a character you already know. It can be really gratifying to go back and see how you could interpret some of what he’s saying. I enjoyed that, but I really was for the most part thinking of him as Halbrand. Who is this guy? What would he say? And then to give him that underlying Sauron-ness.”
The scene in which Galadriel discovers Halbrand’s identity in the finale, titled “Alloyed,” was even trickier to navigate, as the pair had spent the entire season as allies. Even after Sauron admits who he is, he doesn’t try and harm Galadriel. He attempts to recruit her to his side by offering her the chance to rule Middle-earth together. It’s a not so subtle nod to a famous scene from The Fellowship of the Ring, where a much older Galadriel is tempted by the One Ring carried by Frodo but ultimately resists its urges. She does the same in this scene with Sauron, but it’s his motivations that are the murkiest. Is he being genuine in his offer, or is it another one of his tricks? “We really wanted to make sure that final scene between them played right,” Hutchison says. “We wanted to make sure we were hitting the right tone because there are multiple shifts in it. We worked on that in the room as we pitched dialogue—in the writing with myself and Patrick and J.D. going back and forth and really making sure it was dialed in. It was always wrapped in the relationship they built and his pitch to her because of that relationship they’ve forged. He leans on this thing of, You temper me, and I help elevate and push you. I push you, and you pull me back. I don’t want a villain who is just being evil. They have to believe what they’re saying, and there has to be a consistent reason behind it. And he’s really pushing that idea of, Look what we’ve already achieved together. I love that people aren’t sure if he is sincere or not. I have my opinions and Charlie Vickers has his, but it’s fun that everyone gets to read into it.”
Doble wrestled with something similar in the season’s fifth episode, “Partings,” which contains a scene in which Galadriel has to convince Halbrand to join her in an expedition to Middle-earth. Halbrand must be talked into leaving Númenor, even though logically it would seem the one thing Sauron wants most is to return home so he can rule. “I think you can kind of see it either way,” the writer says. “In the text, Tolkien says nothing is evil in the beginning, even Sauron. We talked about Sauron and had a lot of discussions about this. Is he just genuinely purely evil, or was there a time where perhaps he had done some things and was actually seeking redemption? There was a piece of him that could have been good at one point if not for extenuating circumstances. I think you could view this scene through either prism, and I think in honesty probably either could be true. For me in writing that scene, I think because we were hiding the ball, you want to write it from an authentic place. And for Halbrand, I think he does have the belief that maybe things could go a different way and he could be somebody else, but I think he can’t help himself. He’s addicted to power, and she’s offering him this thing [to return home]. It’s almost like an alcoholic who’s quit drinking and somebody keeps asking him to come out for a drink and he keeps saying no, but he can only keep saying no for so long. For me when I wrote the scene, he was genuinely reluctant. I think there could have been a version of Sauron who went to Númenor, saw the place for the beautiful kingdom that it was and just stayed there—if he wasn’t so drawn to power. Inevitably, that part of him was always going to be drawn out.”
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