The return to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is a cinematic world made for the big screen. This time, though, it’s on TV.
“Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power,” premiering this week on Prime Video, is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” but with familiar communities: humans, dwarves, elves and, of course, Dark Lord Sauron.
“There’s a bit of adventure and a bit of danger,” Markella Kavenagh, the 21-year-old Australian actress who plays harfoot Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot, told the Daily News.
“Tragedy will offset hilarity and hilarity will offset tragedy. It kind of goes back and forth between the two.”
The “Rings of Power” showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, have a full five seasons mapped out and, in their telling, a promise from Prime Video to let it play out. The price tag associated with that vision is enormous: a reported $250 million for the rights and an estimated $465 million for the first season alone.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, reportedly searching for his own “Game of Thrones”-sized hit and a big Tolkien fan himself, was happy to shell out the money.
The timing couldn’t be better — or worse, depending on who you ask: two weeks before “Rings of Power” premieres, “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” hit rival HBO, drawing almost 10 million viewers its first night.
After some reshuffling of the schedules, the “Lord of the Rings” finale will air one week before “House of the Dragon.”
But none of that is the problem of the cast. Not the marketing budget or the cost to shoot in New Zealand or even the Nielsen score. They get to just immerse themselves in Middle-earth.
“Tolkein is so loved by so many people and the work is so loved and the lore is so loved [and] hopefully we’ve created something that can feel connected to as much as previous works,” Kavenagh said.
“But the approach to story and character is the same regardless of what the project is. I want to be specific with storytelling regardless of scale and budget.”
That said, the scale is enormous. Oceans and mountains and mines. Entire worlds, written down by Tolkien, brought to life.
“We talk a lot about it being genuinely immersive,” Sara Zwangobani, the Australian actress who plays Marigold Brandyfoot, Nori’s mother told The News.
“Even before you step on that set, you’re in the makeup trailer and you’re getting your ears on and you’re getting your hair done and your costume on and your feet and then you walk onto those sets. We were Harfoots running around in the forest and that goes a long way to creating the character as much as anything else.”
The harfoots, ancestors to the hobbits, are one of the few groups who didn’t appear in the blockbuster movies. For the most part, they stick to the ground, foraging and surviving off the land.
“At least in the beginning, they have remained hidden from the world,” said Zwangobani.
“They fit into the world because they are so connected to Middle Earth, but in the larger world, they’ve removed themselves. In some ways, they’ve taken themselves out of the world.”
But when a mysterious man comes crashing down to earth right in front of Nori and best friend Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards), the harfoots find themselves unable to hide much longer and instead are thrown into the chaos that has befallen Middle-earth as Sauron amasses power.
The rest of the tribes are more aggressive in their quests for peace: Galadriel, an Elven warrior played by Morfydd Clark, a younger version of Cate Blanchett’s character in Peter Jackson’s movies, who is out for blood after Sauron killed her brother; Elrond (Robert Aramayo), an elven politician with dreams of power in Lindon; a sailor named Isildur (Maxim Baldry) who will eventually cut the ring off Sauron’s hand.
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