Sauron is finally feeling relaxed. Well, not the real Sauron, but rather the actor who plays him. In 2022, Charlie Vickers became the first human to ever take on the role of The Lord of The Rings’ biggest baddie, thus far only portrayed on-screen as a giant flaming eye (or massive suit of spiky armour).
The 33-year-old Australian actor, who had no major credits to his name before this project, is under no misapprehension of how big a deal his casting was. “I don't think anything will ever match getting this role in terms of changing the trajectory of my career,” Vickers says humbly, sitting across from me in a Piccadilly hotel on an early morning.
It’s August, only a few short weeks before The Rings of Power’s second season airs. And things have been left on quite a cliffhanger.
After a season of Sauron masquerading as a rugged Southlander named Halbrand, we only found out his true identity in the penultimate episode. The role was shrouded in secrecy; even Vickers himself didn’t know he was Sauron until he was filming episode three.
“The showrunners [J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay] said ‘Let’s go for a walk’ and they took me onto a set,” Vickers recalls. They arrived on a shadowy, unseen set that wouldn’t appear on-screen until season two. “Then they said, ‘Welcome to your lair.’”
In theory, that should have been the moment Vickers relaxed. Knowing he would be playing such a huge character, as central to The Rings of Power’s plot as you could possibly get, meant guaranteed work for the foreseeable future. Quite a big deal for an actor who had just finished drama school, and whose previous credits comprised eight episodes of the TV series Medici (2018), the Australian film Palm Beach (2019) and little else.
But he didn’t relax. Because Vickers then had to hide his secret identity as Sauron, the great deceiver (this irony is not lost on Vickers), throughout an entire, mega, Marvel-esque press tour, right up until episode eight, which (given the series dropped new episodes weekly) landed a month and a half into its release.
Vickers likens it to the operation behind Spiderman: No Way Home, when Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire had to viciously protect the reveal of their returns. “Because the old Spidermen were coming back, they were just flat out lying, being like, ‘No, I’m not coming back. That's stupid.’ I definitely didn't go as hard line as that, but it was fun,” he says. But Vickers much prefers being honest. “I'm so glad now that I can talk,” he shares. “I couldn't do it. I couldn't be a liar for that long.”
In an interview with The New York Times published immediately after the reveal, Vickers is practically overflowing with information about Sauron that he’s been forbidden from sharing until that day.
He’s obsessed with him. Understandably. Vickers read all the source material to prep for the role, starting with Tolkien’s ultra-dense First Age book, The Silmarillion, as well as scores of his personal and professional letters. “I did all this research and had all this stuff to say about Sauron, which is such a weird mastermind topic to have,” he tells me.
Now the jig is up, and yes, Vickers is finally relaxed. “I feel chiller within every respect,” he says, “Because I know what the beast is now, right?” He’s referring to the show’s massive production and budget, which Forbes has estimated at somewhere between $750 million and $1 billion for season one – the most anyone has ever spent on a TV production.
Sauron is feeling chiller, too. In Rings of Power season two, he’s finally gained some semblance of control after forging the first three rings with master metalsmith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards). He drops the identity of Halbrand and adopts an Elvish form, claiming to be Annatar, the "Lord of Gifts”, so he can persuade Celebrimbor to cobble together a few more rings, with which to corrupt the whole of Middle Earth.
Now the audience knows Vickers is Sauron, he’s allowed to give more of the character away on screen – little flickers of evil when the mask occasionally slips. But how do you play evil when your main physical reference is a big glowing eye?
“I've watched The Boys for a long time, and I've mentioned Ant[ony] Starrs performance in that before. I think he’s amazing,” Vickers says. “It's more about watching good actors playing villainous characters. But that's an example of someone that I took some inspiration from.” You can see the comparisons if you know what to look for. There’s a clip in the trailer that shows Annatar break character for a moment, his lip quivering, revealing the Sauron within – and a little bit of Homelander, too.
But there’s also a non-physical form of Sauron in this season. In a flashback, old Sauron (played by Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden in a fun, campy cameo) is defeated by his old right-hand Elf, Adar, and loses his mortal form. He becomes a black mass of goo, something Vickers found deeply enjoyable. “When they pitched that idea to me – well, that makes it sound like they pitched the idea to me and I had to approve it – when they told me about their idea I was super excited,” he laughs. “It's very dark. But there's also something kind of sinister and quite funny about the blob.”
You can tell Vickers is having a whale of a time playing Sauron. Even this season, when he’s largely separated from the entire cast (save for Celebrimbor), he isn’t sad about missing out on the immersive location filming, or the crowds of extras in Orc costumes. “It was a very chill experience compared to season one,” he says, likening his season two journey to being in a play. “When Charlie Edwards and I were working, we were just on one set the whole time, and it was like we were doing a play, because there were hundreds of people watching, but they're all the crew,” he says, adding that it still feels “massive” in terms of production, just in a different way.
Even getting up for a 3am hair and makeup session (all thanks to his new Elf persona) didn’t bother Vickers, who had befriended all of the prosthetics people. “They’re the first people you see, so it’d be me and Charlie in the chairs, it's dark outside and it's freezing cold, but we're all just chatting,” he says. “It’s like a protective circle, because it starts very simply, and it makes you realize the amount of effort that everyone else puts in to try and make it happen, right up to the people that switch the generators at 3am. It stops you from getting too up in your head.”
So when you’re watching The Rings of Power this season, rest assured that Sauron is having a thoroughly good time. And he’s actually bloody lovely.
