In the book version of The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf forbids anybody from calling Frodo “the Lord of the Rings.” That sinister honorific is reserved for Sauron only, who throughout all of Tolkien’s writings has many names: the Necromancer, the Lidless Eye, the Dark Lord, the Lord of Mordor, and the Nameless One. But, canonically, he also has many faces. He began his life as Mairon sometime in the First Age of Middle-earth and, in allying himself with another Dark Lord, Morgoth, he steadily gained a wide range of powers, including the ability to change his shape, including but not limited to: a serpent, a vampire and a werewolf.
In The Rings of Power Season 2, we might not see a vampire version of Sauron, but the show is about to reveal a previously unknown face of the Ringmaker. No major spoilers ahead.
A second Sauron actor revealed
Ahead of the launch of The Rings of Power Season 2, Prime Video dropped a preview feature that reveals that the new season will have a scene in which another actor — not Charlie Vickers — plays Sauron in a flashback. That actor is Jack Lowden, portraying “a thousand years before the first season.”
While we can’t reveal exactly what happens in this flashback, those who watched Season 1 already know that somehow Sauron has to become his Halbrand form, played by Vickers. While Halbrand was a new creation for the Prime Video series, the notion that Sauron could change his form is something embedded in the appendices of The Return of the King but also appears memorably in “Of Beren and Lúthien,” which is a section of The Silmarillion. And, while The Rings of Power doesn’t adapt The Silmarillion directly, the new season embraces Sauron’s dark shapeshifting magic much more directly. And with the introduction of the younger Jack Lowden version, we’re getting a glimpse of Sauron during the very beginning of the Second Age.
Sauron’s most important face
While the new, younger flashback Sauron will add a new dimension to the origin of the character in The Rings of Power, the present tense of the show will bring back Charlie Vickers not just in the human Halbrand guise, but will also task the actor with playing Annatar, which is another “fair form” of Sauron, and the one used to trick the Elves into making more rings. In Season 1, The Rings of Power danced around this bit of lore by having Halbrand influence Celebrimbor into making the three Elven rings. But because Galadriel knows Halbrand is Sauron, Season 2 will force the Dark Lord into trying on another face.
This is why Vickers will also play Annatar, who appears to be one of the Elves, but who the audience knows is also Sauron. To be clear, this level of Sauron shapeshifting has never been depicted in any onscreen adaptations of Lord of the Rings, not even in Rings of Power Season 1. While Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy gave us the Necromancer form of Sauron, that’s pretty much the most different and radical version we’ve seen of him onscreen prior to Rings of Power.
But, now, we’re getting three Saurons in one season. With this level of Dark Lord shapeshifting, who knows, maybe he will turn into a vampire.
