When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power took the stage at San Diego Comic-Con to showcase season three, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay and several cast members shared a first teaser and talked about the new additions to the ensemble, including Jamie Campbell Bower as Galadriel’s long-lost husband, Celeborn.
The team also teased more about what’s in store when the J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation returns in November, including details on what’s happened since we last saw Middle-earth in season two.
Five years have passed, Payne explained. “Sauron has been spreading his armies all across Middle-earth, and this is really the season we’ve been building to. There’s only a few pockets of resistance that are able to keep him at bay. You’ve got the Elven realms of Lindon and Rivendell that are protected by the power of the Three Rings, then you’ve got the Dwarven realm of Khazad-dûm that has so far been neutral in the war.”
“But Sauron has a plan to turn the tide. He made nine rings for men last season, and now he’s giving them out,” continued Payne. “He’s getting allies from north, south, west, and, importantly, the east. He’s trying to recruit a massive, massive army from the lands of Rhûn to come in and tip the scales in the war. But his real plan, the big plan that brings everything together, [the] one for which all roads lead to Sauron this season, is he’s gonna forge the One Ring to rule them all.”
McKay added that some of the new locations for Rings of Power season three will be especially exciting for Tolkien fans, including “Barad-dûr, so we’re in the Dark Tower in Mordor” and “seeing what Rivendell might’ve looked like thousands of years before Bilbo and Frodo saw it. We even went back to Tolkien’s own watercolor drawings of it and even shot in the actual valley in Switzerland that I think [he] was inspired by. So our amazing production designer, Kristian Milsted, has come up with something really cool. We can’t wait for you guys to see it.”
As for the returning characters, Daniel Weyman was especially excited to explore his character’s arc now that we all know his true identity as Gandalf—a secret the actor had been sitting on for years before it became clear to the audience.
“I know how much this character means to so many people,” Weyman said. “What J.D. and Patrick have done here, [I think] they’ve given me such a gift of a character. We’ve seen in this time gap between season two and three, he’s been sitting around with Tom Bombadil. He’s been trying to learn his stuff, and he can’t make sense of these riddles that Tom keeps coming up with. But he is learning.”
To Weyman, Gandalf has really “arrived in season three. He’s in his power and has agency. It is the Gandalf I think we all hopefully know and love. And that means that as he tries to influence what’s going on in Middle-earth as the darkness is rising, he’s learning that it’s not all about sort of wielding the staff and creating massive magic power. It’s also about that soft power touching people’s hearts.”
The SDCC panel also revealed that Simon Pegg will be voicing the Balrog. Though the audience got a glimpse of Pegg in a behind-the-scenes video, the creature actually speaking has yet to be revealed. However, as Payne explained, the choice to let the Balrog talk goes back to the source material.
“Creatures in Tolkien talk,” he said. “Full stop. And the Balrog is not just a monster, it’s not a mindless beastie. This is an intelligent, strategic, dangerous adversary, and we think of him as a character in this show. Every season, we want to show a different side of him, a different facet of him that you’ve never seen before. And we are crazy, stupid, or wild enough to imagine that this season, he should have a scene with Sauron. I don’t want to give away the game, but Balrogs know how to live in fire. If Sauron is going to go into a volcano to forge a ring, that might be a kind of dark magic that he would need to understand. And he essentially goes to the Balrog to try to learn this power.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season three begins November 11 on Prime Video.
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