Maxance Vincent
For the entirety of season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Sauron (Charlie Vickers) are kept apart. Sauron presents himself as Annatar, Lord of Gifts, to manipulate Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) into forging corrupted rings of power for Dwarves and Men, while Galadriel forms an unlikely alliance with Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and the Orcs to defeat the Dark Lord, after learning of Halbrand’s true identity at the end of the first season.
However, in the show’s last episode, Adar is brutally slain by the Orcs, who have become disillusioned with him and are now following Sauron’s path to take control of Middle-earth after he has successfully killed Celebrimbor. This moment is also the first time in which Galadriel and Sauron come face-to-face since their last meeting in the first season, leading to a climactic confrontation that’s as much physical as it is psychological.
In approaching this highly-anticipated reunion, Charlie Vickers tells Awards Radar during a virtual Zoom press day that he saw this scene “from the point of view of Sauron approaching Galadriel and saying, “You can still join me. The door is still open.” That was the key to that scene. It was him being like, “You have one more chance.” And it was an interesting one. I don’t know how [Morfydd] found it, but because it was so physical, I didn’t want us to get caught up in worrying about all the action and fighting because there was a real scene beneath that. I think that’s what the stunt team were amazing in trying to help us bring the actual scene out of the action.”
For Morfydd Clark, who joined Vickers during the press day interview, this sequence felt like Galadriel was not only battling with Sauron but with her inner feelings:
“I feel like Galadriel was battling with Sauron just as much as she was battling with herself. To see how she doesn’t have faith in herself at the beginning of that scene, and finding belief that she can prevail in goodness was really fun to explore. But as an actress, it was just incredible to act opposite Charlie. I loved Charlie’s Halbrand. I thought it was brilliant to see this kind of lovable robe that we all fell in love with. To see just this complete transformation that also still had the essence of the character that we’d seen glimpses of at the end of episode eight of season one was, as an actress, really exciting for me.”
Of course, there is so much to talk about when discussing this season of The Lord of the Rings, but with the limited time we had for the interview, it primarily focuses on their on-screen reunion in the season finale. But in ten minutes, we managed to discuss not only how they approached this much-anticipated sequence but also the training process behind it, how Sauron tapped into Galadriel’s inner feelings, and how they played Sauron’s transformation back into Halbrand and Galadriel. We also discussed which scenes they were the most excited to talk about after being sworn to secrecy for many months when the season aired.
You can watch my interview with Morfydd and Charlie below, and see all episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Season 2 on Prime Video today:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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