‘The Most Ambitious Thing We’ve Ever Attempted’: Rings of Power Creators on the Year-Long Journey to Bring Season 2’s Siege of Eregion Sequence to Life
The Rings of Power Season 2’s upcoming tentpole battle sequence is “the most ambitious undertaking we’ve ever undertaken,” says co-showrunner Patrick McKay, who gave me no uncertain terms about the size, scale and scope of this season’s action spectacle.
Speaking to Ny Breaking ahead of Season 2’s launch in late August, McKay opened up about the amount of work that went into bringing The Siege of Eregion to life. An era-defining battle, the bloody and devastating conflict is perhaps the most significant of The Lord of the Ring‘ iconic battles. Not only does it kick off the War of the Elves and Sauron that spans much of Middle-earth’s Second Age, but it also sets up events in the Third Age, the largest of which were covered in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit And The Lord of the Ring film trilogies.
Some of the battles depicted in those films, such as The two towers‘Helm’s Deep and The Return of the KingThe Siege of Gondor, clearly has elements of influence from The Rings of Power‘s take on the Siege of Eregion. During our conversation, McKay and co-creator JD Payne didn’t elaborate on the inspirations they drew from that duo that influenced the Prime Video show’s latest big-budget battle.
Still, McKay and Payne wanted to honor the multi-stage action scenes that Jackson and co. had adapted for the big screen, and the way the Siege of Eregion is depicted in Tolkien’s literary works.
“The Siege of Eregion is the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken for this series,” McKay admitted. “And that’s saying something, because everything in this series is ambitious.”
“We wanted to do a classic, epic, roaring Tolkien battle with not just two sides, but multiple armies and multiple races clashing. Also, sieges don’t happen in a day or a night, they happen over a matter of weeks or months, so we want you to feel that time. We want you to feel the phases that it goes through. We have an aerial bombardment, destruction of the city and the natural environment, (and) then there’s a horse charge and a ground assault. In episode eight, it turns into hand-to-hand street fighting, like (the Battle of) Stalingrad.”
That sounds like a lot to wrap up in the final two episodes of the Amazon prequel series – and that’s before you even consider the other Season 2 storylines in Númenor, Pelargir, Khazad-dûm, and Rhûn that also need some form of resolution before The Rings of Power leaves our screens once again. It’s a good thing McKay, Payne, and the show’s thousands of cast and crew members did their utmost to ensure that filming for The Siege of Eregion went as smoothly as possible.
“It took a year to prepare,” McKay revealed, “and it took weeks to film. We had hundreds of extras and an immense amount of prosthetics made by Barrie and Sarah Gower. And then there’s the stunt work done by our amazing stunt team, the pyrotechnics, our CGI troll, and then there’s our production director Charlotte Brandstrom and second unit director Vic Armstrong who captured it all on camera. It’s everything, all the time, but we’re really proud of the result.”
So we can expect an episode or two similar to HBO’s ‘Battle of the Bastards’ and ‘The Long Night’. Game of Thronesright? Not quite. Like I said, there are other stories running concurrently with The Siege of Eregion, so the second season of one of Prime Video’s best series won’t end with an episodic pairing that leaves the audience exhausted by the conclusion.
“It’s not wall-to-wall action,” McKay admitted. “You’re moving in and out of sequences of very tense action and emotional character-driven moments. The Siege of Eregion isn’t just the big bang at the end of the season. It is that, but it’s also the knot that ties together all these different storylines with Galadriel, Sauron, Adar, Celebrimbor, Elrond, Durin – it ties them together. So you don’t just get narrative explosions; you get emotional character explosions, epiphanies, and huge changes in the course of the history of Middle-earth.”
As Galadriel noted in Season 2 Episode 4, you should “prepare” for both tragic and heroic moments. Before the penultimate chapter of this season arrives, be sure to read some of my exclusive stories with the series cast below, which give a sneak peek at what’s to come in the final two episodes.