The following contains major spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2, Episode 8, “Shadow and Flame,” now streaming on Prime Video.
In the Season 2 finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Sauron brutally murders the Elven smith Celebrimbor in a scene that echos J.R.R. Tolkien’s lore. Charlie Vickers, who stars as the Dark Lord, recently talked with The Hollywood Reporter about why his character sheds a few tears after driving that fateful final arrow that kills Celebrimbor.
“It’s funny, it’s one of those things where I did the scene and I wasn’t expecting to get emotional,” said Vickers, who up until the last part of Season 2 was masquerading as the gift-bearing elf Annatar. “It’s not like it was a planned thing. It just happened. And then when you talk about it, you have to go back and try and unpack why, and sometimes there is no explanation for these things.”
Vickers said it was Celebrimbor’s final words to Sauron that brought him to tears. In the Lord of Eregion’s final moments, he predicts the rings will be Sauron’s downfall, telling him, “One alone shall prove your utter ruin.” In the end, Vickers said Celebrimbor is someone Sauron respected.
“But in thinking about why he might have been feeling like that, there’s a lot of different things. I think you do see him kill people in this show, and he often kills them quite matter-of-factly, let’s say. It’s different with Celebrimbor because he has been a partner in crime and someone (Sauron) really respects and someone he could have used,” Vickers said.
Sauron Had Been “Defeated”
He added Sauron is also angry in the moment “that he’s been defeated because Celebrimbor has hidden these rings. Sauron needs the rings, yet Celebrimbor wants to die before he tells Sauron where these rings are. And Sauron says, ‘There are many ways of keeping you alive,’ something like that. So, he clearly wants to torture him until he finds out, but it’s just like the way Celebrimbor tells him that he’s now a slave to these creations.”
Vickers said things hit home with Sauron, and he loses control and kills Celebrimbor. “And I think that makes him really angry and upset because it’s so un-Sauron to be out of control. It is more interesting to watch than him just dispatching everyone,” he said.
A third season of The Rings of Power has yet to be confirmed by Amazon, but Vickers has some ideas for his character moving forward. He told The Hollywood Reporter there are several things he would love to see, such as the War of the Elves and Sauron, the Fall of Númenor, the War of the Last Alliance, and the forging of the actual ring.
“There’s so much I’m looking forward to, but I feel like when I watched episode seven and eight I was thinking, ‘Is this what the show is, full throttle from here on?’ And that’s a really exciting prospect,” Vickers said.
There’s so much I’m looking forward to.
Vickers said in the future, Sauron will seek to control the rest of Middle-earth. “This is where it begins, and he needs to conquer all the different parts of Middle-earth, be it Númenóreans, elves. And he has these nine rings that he’s just got from Galadriel. I think task number one is probably: who am I going to give these nine rings to, to enslave them? He’s got a big to-do list,” Vickers said.
The Rings of Power is streaming on Prime Video.
