For the 'Rings of Power' Showrunners, the Road Goes Ever On
This interview contains spoilers for the Season One finale of Rings of Power.
After five long years spent developing, writing, and filming the most expensive television series of all time, Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have finally reached the end of the road—of Season One, anyway. The explosive Season One finale, full of sound, fury, and shocking reveals, has been a massive undertaking years in the making, but Payne and McKay are only just getting started. As Tolkien himself would tell us, “the road goes ever on and on”—four more seasons lie ahead, meaning that for the next decade, Payne and McKay know where they’ll be hanging their hats. “We were both ready to make that commitment and make that sacrifice,” Payne says, Zooming with Esquire alongside McKay. “It certainly has not disappointed us. It’s been the joy of a lifetime.”
As the season has progressed, viewers have lit up the Internet with questions and theories. Is The Stranger actually Sauron, Gandalf, Glorfindel, or someone else? Could Halbrand’s true identity be the Witch King of Angmar, The King of the Dead, or maybe even big baddie Sauron himself? The finale drops two thrilling reveals: The Stranger is a wizard (presumably Gandalf) and Halbrand is Sauron. (We’ll allow you a minute to let that sink in.) But if you think you have all the answers now, think again—as the showrunners tell Esquire, there are four more seasons of twists, turns, and thrills yet to come. Days before the Season One finale aired, Payne and McKay took us inside the story, from how they planned the big Sauron reveal to what lies ahead for Galadriel. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: Of all the forms you could have given Sauron, why Halbrand? Why was that the perfect deception?
J.D. Payne: It always goes back to the books for us. There was one tantalizing sentence in “The Mirror of Galadriel” when Galadriel was talking Frodo and Sam. She says, “I perceive the dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed.” That felt like a really loaded statement to us, speaking to some kind of a relationship. Galadriel also says when she's offered the ring, "Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen." She feels like she's experienced or anticipated this temptation for a long time. All of these things spoke to a long history with darkness, and more specifically with Sauron. So we asked: would we like to figure out some kind of relationship between them? If you could do it in a way where she meets him without knowing who he is, which feels fair given that he's a deceiver and shapeshifter, we felt like there was this opportunity. From there, we started backfilling. What kind of person would he have to be? How would they meet?
ESQ: There are plenty of clues in the episode that these characters are not who they appear to be. For me, the jig was up when Halbrand says, "Consider it a gift." Lord of Gifts—it’s Sauron! But a viewer who hasn't read the books wouldn't have that reaction. You’ve done a masterful job of creating something that's full of rewards for devoted readers, but still thrilling and surprising for casual fans.
Patrick McKay: That’s the real trick, isn't it? This is something we talk about endlessly. We’re treading on sacred ground here—this is enormously beloved and rich lore. There are thousands and thousands of years of history. This was a man's life's work, and the canon is so labyrinthine. Working on the show has been a joy in seeing that there’s no end to it. There’s no bottom. Every leaf has a story.
It's a little intimidating to create something within the empty spaces that he left. What we found ourselves going back to again and again was this question: how do we honor the spirit of what you feel when you read Tolkien? In other adaptations, where have they been successful in capturing that unique mix of tones and themes that were important to him? The challenge and the opportunity here was to tell a new story in that world, in the spaces he left blank, informed by everything he wrote, but also a story that would be an emotionally engaging, delightful, exciting, thrilling journey as your first step into this enormous body of work. Hopefully we're passing through both checks with fans and non-fans. It’s a constant balancing act and something we never stopped talking about. There are places where we’ll probably look back and think, "We could’ve done better here for the fans, or better here for the non-fans.” It’s hard. But if it was easy, everyone would do it.
ESQ: One of my favorite moments of the season was when Adar says to Galadriel, "Perhaps your search for Morgoth's successor should have ended in your own mirror." I loved him forcing Galadriel to confront how her obsession with vengeance has changed her. Obsession is something she and Sauron have in common; they’re both obsessed with “bringing peace to Middle Earth,” although they disagree about what that looks like. What's next for her?
JP: I think there has to be a reckoning. Even knowing that Sauron was partially involved in the science behind the making of the rings, we see her give the go-ahead to make the rings anyway. She also has to bear some responsibility; “I empowered the Dark Lord. I saved his life on a raft. I was party to him coming from obscurity to head an army.” That’s a lot she has to wrestle with and be accountable for. I think we can expect to see her having to pick up those threads and see how those decisions impact her various relationships.
PM: Season One has been a real journey for Galadriel emotionally. She was so sure that she was right, that this was her destiny, that this is the fight she had to have. When she's watching the ash cloud come toward her in Episode Seven, she really feels what a terrible mistake her pride has led her to make and pull so many people into. I love watching her and Theo in that episode. I really feel her reflecting on her own mistakes and counseling Theo not to make the same mistakes that she has made. But then in the eighth episode, we end with Elrond finding evidence that she lied to him. Her facing the consequences of that has not ended yet.
ESQ: We got a big shocker in that episode when Galadriel revealed that she was once married. Readers of the books were wondering when Celeborn was going to enter the picture, but I think it's safe to say no one expected this. Why did that feel like the right reveal?
PM: We're always looking for ways to plant seeds that can hopefully grow into trees later down the road. We’ve tried to approach the architecture of the entire Second Age as a long-term creative project, so there are canon characters all over Season One. There are additional canon characters that we have yet to get into in future seasons. We also love the idea of Galadriel being so wise already, even as this young, brash version of herself. She's thousands of years old. She was married for maybe a few hundred years, and that's still just a blip to an elf. That's just one more experience, one more tragedy, one more loss that's fueling her. We liked the idea that sometimes you tell a new friend or a stranger something you would never tell your closest friends. Maybe Theo's confessions are provoking confessions from her.
JP: An elf who's been alive for thousands of years has a bigger Rolodex than a human. In Season One, we were interested in getting to know Galadriel as an individual first because we had a certain idea of the story—especially the idea of her having a relationship with Halbrand, who turns out to be Sauron. We were also interested in telling a story about the friendship between her and Elrond. That felt like a core relation. We asked ourselves: what are the core relationships for Season One Galadriel? As far as Celeborn goes, we wanted to let people know that this is a part of her that could become important later on. We didn't take him off the board and say he's dead. She says, "I never saw him again" and we leave it as an ellipsis. But if and when that comes back, that would be like a freight train crashing into her, if the love of her life is still around. Now that we've spread the foundation of her relationships with Sauron, Elrond, and even Gil-Galad, we have the opportunity in future seasons to see how other relationships, maybe including Celeborn, will continue to show other sides of her.
ESQ: As I’ve followed along with the show, I’ve been fascinated by how you work around the First Age context from The Silmarillion. That material, I’m given to understand, is off-limits. As you crafted this story, did that feel like a limitation or a challenge?
PM: Amazon has licensed the rights to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which includes the appendices at the end of Return of the King, as well as The Hobbit. The stories of the First Age are contained within that material in abbreviated form. So that history and that mythos is part of Lord of the Rings, even if you never read The Silmarillion. Going into the Second Age, we felt that it was important to set context for the audience the same way that the Second Age sets context for the Third Age.
Tolkien talks about “distant mountains”—every place you go in Middle-earth, there's something in the distance, and if you go there, there's something else in the distance. For the characters in this era of Middle-earth, the First Age is in the distance. We like the idea of tantalizing and teasing and alluding to that history, but ultimately that's its own story with its own complexities and richness, told in another book that maybe someone down the road will adapt. But the aspects of it that felt germane to the conflicts and struggles of each of these characters, we felt were important to fill in. For example, the fact that Sauron, at this time in his development, is coming off of being the second-in-command. He’s not yet the Dark Lord. You're going to watch him become that, presumably, over the course of the Second Age and over the course of the show. Even the fact that he had a boss is important context. The fact that Galadriel lived through those wars and lost people to those wars felt like enormously important context.
JP: I'll make a musical analogy, because music is very important in Tolkien. Think about when you're playing jazz. It's layered. You have a piano that plays with the trumpet, that plays with the bass, that plays with the drums. Imagine if you took away one of those instruments, but you still have the other parts of it. What we try to do is always tell stories that can play jazz with the things we don't have the rights to in the First Age. If you're a fan, your mind will fill in the drumbeat underneath it, because you know what stories were there. With the stories we layer on top of it, you can say, “I see how that adds another tone or flavor on top of the things that are there outside of the rights grant.” It’s a constant dance of wanting to make sure that it harmonizes and doesn't contradict, but also doesn’t use things we don't have the rights to.
ESQ: Season One had a huge responsibility set the table for the new viewer. Now that you've set the table, what do you feel freer to do in the future?
PM: Obviously Sauron is now a chess piece on the board. We felt that it was important not to start this show with Sauron on the rampage, because when you have a villain so compelling and complex and dangerous, he tends to hog up a lot of airspace. So we wanted to earn and work our way to that complexity of evil. But now that he’s a chess piece on the board, there are a lot of dominoes that start to fall. The ring poem is in a song at the end of the eighth episode sung by Fiona Apple and composed by Bear McCreary. Seven rings, nine rings, one ring—each batch could potentially be a new turn in the story and a new turn in Sauron's development through the Second Age. Right there in the eighth episode, there's some hints as to where we might go next. We hope that Season One has invested you in the relationships in such a way that you're along for the journey. But we've been pretty open in the past about where we intend to go: we're going to tell the story of the forging of the rings of power, the rise the Dark Lord Sauron, the fall of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Exactly when and how we're going there, and what hopefully delightful twists come along the way, will be things that people will have to wait and see.
ESQ: If you were dropped into Middle-earth tomorrow, who would you want to be in this universe?
PM: Well, Númenor is pretty great because it's an island, and there's beautiful beaches, and the people are beautiful, and the architecture is beautiful. It would be pretty sweet to live in Númenor as long as I die at their height, before things start becoming horrible.
JP: I think being a Noldorian Elf would be pretty amazing. If you’re one of the exiles, you've been to Valinor, you know what that’s like, you retain a memory of the joy of Elf Heaven or the place of great light, but you also get to be in Middle-earth, where you’re making a difference in the lives of people. You have an immortal life to learn and experience and grow and see all the wonders of Middle-earth. You could see all these various creatures and you're still vulnerable. But also, being an Istar would be pretty sweet, because you’re able to come back at various points.
ESQ: Rings of Power isn’t your first rodeo with a big franchise. What can you tell us about the abandoned Star Trek movie you wrote?
PM: I would love to tell you about it. We worked on a couple of Star Trek movies. The one you’re asking about would have been the fourth in the franchise, reuniting Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pine. The conceit was that through a cosmic quirk in the Star Trek world, they were the same age. It was going to be a grand father-son space adventure—think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in space. We were really thrilled about it. We had an original villain and a really cool 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque sci-fi idea at the core. We worked on it for two and half years with Lindsey Weber, our non-writing executive producer on Rings of Power, and an amazing director, S.J. Clarkson. The movie eventually fell apart and it really was a heartbreak for us. It’s part of what led us here, because it got us thinking, “Gosh, with a big IP title, big movie stars, and a story that we all felt had the chance to be terrific, it couldn't come together.” We felt the winds were shifting against big movies, which is part of what made us start taking TV seriously. That led us to Rings of Power. But we would have loved to make that movie. I want to spoil a piece of it that's exciting—how they end up together. Can we do that, JD?
JP: Sure, why not? There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Relics” where they find Scotty, who's been trapped a transporter for a couple of decades, and they're able to have cool adventure with him. Our conceit was, “What if right before the Kelvin impacted with that huge mining ship, George Kirk had tried to beam himself over to his wife's shuttle where his son, Jim Kirk, had just been born? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded—what if it left some space junk?” Think about when you send a text message and you’ve typed it out, but you haven't quite hit send. On the other side, they see those three little dots that someone has typed. It’s like the transporter had absorbed his pattern up into the pattern buffer, but hadn’t spit him out on the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was in the computer.
PM: So the adventure is that Chris Pine and the crew of the Enterprise have to seek out the wreckage of the ship that his father died on because of a mystery and a new villain. In the ship, they stumble across his father's pattern. They beam him out and he has no idea that no time has passed at all, and that he's looking at his son. Then the adventure goes from there.
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