In an interview with CBR, Payne and McKay reflect on how much outside sources like viewer opinion affected their approach to the second season, and if there’s such a thing as too much information. They also talk about the pacing of Season 2, and what makes them consider their work successful given the immense weight and meaning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. Plus, find out which storyline from the season was their favorite.
CBR: Going into The Rings of Power Season 2, you had plenty of feedback from viewers about what worked and didn’t work from the first season. So how did you approach or refine the story you wanted to tell the second time around?
JD Payne: It’s challenging, the game of engaging audience feedback, in terms of a creative sort of driver. Because for every person who says they love something, another person will say they hated it — and vice versa. You have very loud scontingents of fandom in all kinds of different corners of the map.
So those things can be useful to listen to, to hear what people are responding to, and see if there’s places that everyone seems to love. But you can’t chase it. You have to really go back to Tolkien. You say, what is it that makes Tolkien work? What are these core story elements and thematics that we want to build into the DNA of the show?
Patrick McKay: We are our own harshest critics. We want a show that’s getting better every episode, every season, every day. And the institutional knowledge of making one season, we feel paid off in making Season 2. We were able to kind of retool the way we did things, and we think the results speak for themselves. We feel like the show’s really hitting its stride.
One of the discussion points was the pacing of Season 2, and how to balance the epic battles and grand scenes with the slower, more intimate character moments. How did you sort that out so as not to let one aspect of the show overshadow the other?
Payne: They say every film is made three times. It’s on the page, then on the stage, and then in the editing room — and it’s very much true. And so sometimes you write this much on the page, and then you get there. The actor’s like, no, we don’t need that; I can do it with a look… and then you’re in the editorial. You’re like, we started this scene here. It should actually start here. Cut off the first 45 seconds of that scene, and it will come in with a lot more energy. We can get out of it earlier too, and that’ll send us into the next scene with more energy.
So often it’s about addition by subtraction. You’re whittling things down. And the piece is sort of telling you what it wants to be as you go. You’re really paying attention to, have we lost the audience here? Are people falling asleep? Are they checking their phones? And trying really hard to keep that tether between us and the audience.
McKay: We obsess about pacing. And we obsess about the balance of very personal, very quiet, very intimate moments, and the biggest moments in Middle-earth. That’s one of the things that we love about Lord of the Rings, is it can move between a very intimate register and a very epic register. And it’s character-driven. Those books are about people. They’re not just about history. We want the show to feel that way as well, and we work very, very hard to try to achieve that balance.
Was there any risk in having too much information to work with, between the feedback you were getting from the fans and the huge amount of source material you had available to you? There’s no shortage of material, either from Tolkien himself or those who love and have studied his universe.
McKay: Middle-earth is vast. You’re balancing multiple storylines. But over the course of Season 2, you’re watching those storylines start to converge. Unexpected character pairings are happening. Characters are dying. Worlds have either collided or are on collision courses. I think the aspiration is, by the time someday when the show has reached its conclusion, it’ll all feel of a piece. And some of that feeling of, “Man, there’s a lot of characters and storylines here,” if they all start to weave together, hopefully the effort the audience is putting in will start to pay off.
Looking back at The Rings of Power Season 2, were there storylines or moments that you felt were executed particularly well, or that you just enjoyed watching as fans? Payne: That final scene between the two Charlies — Charles Edwards and Charlie Vickers — in which Celebrimbor dies. There’s a high bar even on the page. We really took a swing and wanted it to be a pretty epic death for Celebrimbor. I think it came out even better than our very, very high expectations. Both of [the actors] were just really firing on all cylinders… Each of them, you can’t take your eyes off them. It’s one of those scenes where you get into editorial and you’re like, there’s 75 different ways to edit this that would be amazing, because they gave us so much.
McKay: That storyline in general… We took a chance. [In] Season 1, the storyline was sort of anchored around Galadriel and this human Halbrand, who turned out to be Sauron. That was the through line of Season 1. They’re on an adventure together — There’s battles, they’re in the water, there’s a survival epic on a raft, they’re locked up in Numenor. There’s a lot of twists and turns.
Season 2, that central relationship becomes Celebrimbor and Annatar — Sauron in disguise, but this time you know he’s Sauron and Celebrimbor doesn’t. And it’s two people in a room. It’s quite psychological. It’s quite complex. There’s a lot of crafting, and discussion of the ethics of crafting, and of helping different races. There’s a version of that storyline that could have turned out maybe a little too heavy or a little too unrelatable.
But the more we just kept developing it and doubling down on it, the more it felt like it was holding, and we owe a lot of that to those incredible actors, Charlie Vickers and Charlie Edwards. We feel like we all really took a chance there, and and it was great when there was a net beneath us that those two actors were holding.
The streaming numbers for Season 2 were reported throughout the season, but is that your metric for judging success? Or is it the creative satisfaction from moments like that, or the way that Lord of the Rings fans respond to each episode?
Payne: There’s a couple different metrics. Yes, numbers are a thing. We sort of leave that to Amazon to look at… But in terms of personally as artists, there’s stories we’ve heard from various different corners, where someone comes to us and says, I’m a father, I’ve got a couple sons and a daughter and my sons always loved Tolkien. My daughter never did, but she sat down and she got really invested in Rings of Power, and I watch every episode with her.
Someone else told us a similar story about [their] mom, who was having some health challenges… saying it was a thing that they could text each other about every week as the episodes were dropping. It was a good thing that cemented their bond. When this can bring people together, especially across generations or genders or cultures, and be a thing that people can connect on, that’s amazing to us.
McKay: There’s an aspect where we almost don’t want to be satisfied. We want to keep raising the bar. We want to keep making the show better. We want every episode, every season to be better than the last. It’s important every now and then to celebrate and appreciate all the good work that your collaborators have done — then you go back to work. Don’t celebrate too long, and and don’t mull the criticism too much either. Go back to work and make it better next time, and that’s what we’re determined to do.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 is now streaming on Prime Video.
