Spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season-two finale, “Shadow and Flame,†below.
Charlie Vickers loves torturing and murdering Elf-Lords. From a purely artistic perspective, that is.
“Shooting Celebrimbor was when I was like, Yeah, this is cool,†Vickers says with a grin, describing the Rings of Power season-two finale scene in which Sauron, the Dark Lord he portrays, turns on his deceived Elvish collaborator, played by Charles Edwards. Sauron spends the bulk of the season in the guise of an angelic visitor named Annatar, working with Celebrimbor to create the Seven Rings of Power for Dwarves and the Nine Rings for Men. In the finale, Sauron kills his collaborator — and nearly slays the Elf commander Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), the closest thing he has to an even match in Middle-earth — in order to pursue the Rings and bring the peoples of Middle-earth under his control.
“It’s such an iconic image from the books, Celebrimbor’s body impaled full of arrows. The scene is so rich, there are these huge swings and roundabouts of emotion and action, Charlie has this wonderful dying speech, there’s so much going on between the characters — but to be able to re-create that image was my highlight of the show so far.â€
This isn’t just sadism on the Australian actor’s part: If you want to do a good job playing author J.R.R. Tolkien’s “representation of evil,†as Vickers calls his character, you need to take this kind of evildoing seriously. The killing of Celebrimbor in the finale was important to him not just as an actor but a reader: “Now that I’m a big Tolkien fan after doing this show, I have my own imagination of what these events would’ve been like. We’ve just tried to bring that to life.â€
Throughout the season, Annatar’s merciless manipulation of Celebrimbor made him that rarest of post-prestige TV villains: a straight-up black hat with no shades of gray. But Vickers argues pure evil contains a lot of complexity, even as it takes you further and further from humanity.
Your scenes with Charles Edwards in season two almost feel like a psychological thriller within the show, as Sauron slowly wears down poor, kindly Celebrimbor. What influenced the creation of that sense of mounting dread on set?
Gaslight. The showrunners were keen for us to use elements of that film; certainly the themes of it apply. Because we were able to film everything chronologically, we could really plot Celebrimbor’s disintegration, from the moments he fights back to the moments I’m turning the screw on him. We had a lot of fun in the filming process. It’s dark, and there’s some heavy things, but we didn’t stay in that darkness.
Celebrimbor finally turns the tables on Sauron in his dying moments, saying the creation of the rings really just made him their prisoner. It’s weird to think about a Dark Lord’s “motivations,†but it’s like he had this driving need to prove how smart and clever and impressive he is, even to the guy he’s psychologically torturing. Hence the rings.
There’s a lack of self-awareness, if you can say that about a demigod or angel or whatever, because he falls into the same trap Celebrimbor falls into. He’s a slave to these rings because he’ll stop at nothing to achieve them, even if it might compromise his own journey.
But I’m reluctant to do the humanizing side of a villain like this. It’s a theme in contemporary media that villains become three dimensional. I think the character is hugely three-dimensional in what Tolkien wrote, but trying to explain that three-dimensionality in human terms gets a bit tenuous. His hubris and arrogance is wrapped up in the idea that he’s the one to heal and save and rehabilitate Middle-earth.
It’s revealing that when Sauron thinks of what’s best for Middle-earth, his answer is “Me, obviously.â€
Before he was Sauron, he was Mairon. He loves fair things, he loves craft. He believes he’s the only one who possesses all the skills to make Middle-earth a beautiful place, to remake it in the image of Valinor. Even Morgoth couldn’t do it. Sauron believes he can do it better.
As a Tolkien nerd growing up, I wondered why Sauron would risk pouring so much of himself into the One Ring. Even if it boosted his power, he created this huge vulnerability, whether or not he realized it. But seeing him portrayed as a person with this compulsion to prove he’s the best to ever do it, I get it now.
I’m not sure he knows when he creates the One Ring that if he loses it, he’s going to lose a lot of his own power. But to risk that possibility in the first place is a sign of this compulsion. I have to control everything, and I have to do it my way.
That’s why the moments he loses control are interesting. Celebrimbor saying “The rings are controlling you†upsets Sauron so much. He needs Celebrimbor in that moment, he needs him to find out where the Nine Rings for Men are, but he gets so overwhelmed that he just kills him. I always think that’s very un-Sauron: the messy, chaotic anger that comes out occasionally.
Could he have shared control? In his battle with Galadriel, he says he’d have made her Queen of Middle-earth. Did he mean it?Â
He definitely has a connection with Galadriel, and a fascination with her, because she’s kind of on his level. You see it in The Lord of the Rings, in the Mirror of Galadriel. But ruling with her is a step he never would have taken. He could never share this level of power with someone. Maybe she’d have been a figurehead, a mascot for the public, but I don’t believe that, had she said yes, they’d have been king and queen. It would have been him as king and her as his assistant.
Last season, Sauron posed as Halbrand, a human. This season, he’s Annatar, a visitor from the gods, and he looks the part. When you stepped on set dressed like that — the ears, the wig, the gown — did you feel a difference?
Yes, definitely. The costumes inform your movements. Halbrand was kind of raggedy and earthy — you literally can’t move like that in a gown because you’re going to trip. Even something as simple as these lenses I wear, which are green and orange and make my eyes look distant. I can’t see when I’m wearing them. [Laughs.] All I see would be a green haze, and I have no peripheral vision. Simply being on set wearing them had this weird effect of making me feel otherworldly. Everything is blurry, and it was a useful tool: Maybe this is how a Maia sees things.
I worked with a movement coach to develop the way Sauron moved. I wanted everything to be economical. The way we tried to describe it was that because he is this angel, human gestures are too matter-of-fact, too everyday-life. If he was talking like this [gesticulates with his hands as he speaks], things would be flying around the room. He has all this power contained within him, and every movement is thought through. He does nothing unnecessary.
In The Silence of the Lambs, you know that scene where it pans down the corridor and you see Anthony Hopkins standing there for the first time? He’s standing almost like a pin. His legs are really close together, his arms are by his sides … it’s unsettling. I remember watching that and being like, That’s really cool. I can use an element of that. He never blinked throughout the whole performance. I do blink sometimes, with the intention of showing vulnerability, just to soften people up. But there are certainly scenes where I was like, I’m not going to blink because it’s more intense, or I’m really trying to get a message across. It creates that eerie feeling with a camera.
Speaking of horror, the show reconnects Sauron with his monstrous roots. In the books, he’s associated with vampires and werewolves; we’re reintroduced to him as this puddle of vampiric goop that sucks the life from the living and can command giant wolves.
I love the stories of Beren and Luthién, when Sauron shifts into all these different forms, one being a vampire. I’m excited to do more with that connection to these beings of pure hatred and evil that were invented way back in the First Age. When you’re playing Sauron, there is so much canon that the opportunities are limitless.
“Pure hatred and evil†— you mentioned earlier the tendency for dramas to have morally complex villains or anti-heroes. But I can’t imagine Sauron going to his therapist after a murder like Tony Soprano, you know? Your Sauron is constantly lying, all the time, to hurt people, on purpose. As a book nerd, I’m like, yeah, that’s my Sauron.Â
The one major prestige TV character he does remind me of is late-season Walter White from Breaking Bad, in full “Nobody stops this train†mode.
That character’s arc was an inspiration for J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, the showrunners. Something else I always try and remember is the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There are parts of that performance where I was just like, Yeah, that’s the vibe I’m going for at some points. [Laughs.]
Rings is a truly massive production, and your character is right in the middle of the biggest battle it’s ever shown. But for much of that battle, he and Celebrimbor are off in this little world of their own. You mentioned how much that helped your performance — what was it like stepping from that quiet environment into all-out war?
Even though it was just us on the set, and it was essentially a two-man drama, you feel the resources the show has, even inside, because you’re in a completely interactive forge. You’re standing there and you still get the scale of the production, because they’ve built the forge.
But then you go outside and it really hits home, because things are exploding. When I’m walking along the parapet, I’m trying not to flinch, because things are exploding around me, and Sauron wouldn’t be flinching at explosions. And those explosions are real. The courtyard in the city — that’s all real. It’s just the horizon that’s CGI. It fulfills every dream you’ve ever had as an actor to be able to play in a world like that. It’s easy to get caught up in the budget, or the expectation, or the narrative that comes with being part of a project like this. Particularly this project. You see the number of people who are there to help tell Sauron’s story. But ultimately, we’re children going to play on this set every day. Anytime you get weighed down, whether it’s the pressure or the expectation, all it took was for Charlie and I to look at each other and be like, “Look at your ears! That’s amazing!â€