Even if you didn't see The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, you know about it. In 2022, Amazon's eye-wateringly expensive prequel series was clouded by controversy after the non-white actors received horrific racist abuse online. Critics were divided over the slower side plots, but the series still became Prime Video's most-watched series ever.
The show returns this month for a second season, which lead actor Charlie Vickers promises will be darker, grittier and more action-packed than the first.
The 31-year-old Australian portrayed a mysterious stranger known as Halbrand in the first season, who was eventually revealed to be the dark sorcerer Sauron - aka the big fiery eye in the Peter Jackson trilogy. Portraying one of fantasy's most famous villains for your first major role? No pressure, Charlie.
We spoke with Vickers about scuba diving, knitting and why exactly Sauron is so keen to conquer the world.
Square Mile: Tell us how you first got into acting?
Charlie Vickers: In high school, I did a lot of plays. I never thought I could be an actor. It was never the career option that was presented to me.
I went to university in Melbourne. My brother had been on a year abroad in the UK and he came back and said, "Oh, there's these really interesting drama schools and you should look into them," because he knew that I'd done a lot of amateur theatre at university. I went through all the drama schools online and I saw that the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama held auditions in Sydney. I didn't tell anyone. I flew up to Sydney and got in.
SM: What was your first ever acting role at school?
CV: We did a play called Andromeda's Galaxy, which was a kind of Star Trek rip-off. I think I played one of the soldiers on the ship. Definitely just a background part.
SM: So you were doing fantasy roles very early on then in a way?
CV: From Star Trek to Lord of the Rings!
SM: What was your first interaction with The Lord of the Rings?
CV: For my generation, those Peter Jackson films were a huge part of popular culture. So, I'd watched the three of them a lot as a teenager and I'd played the PlayStation games. I think The Two Towers was the really good PlayStation game. It wasn't until I got cast in this that I started to read as much as I could.
SM: Did you have a favourite character in the films?
CV: It's tough because all the characters are very cool! When I was a kid, I definitely thought Aragon was the coolest. Which is interesting because if he had a fight with Legolas, he would probably lose!
SM: Your character Halbrand in season one has inspiration from Aragon, right?
CV: There are a lot of similarities there, and I think particularly with the way they look it is quite similar. There is an Aragon flavour in what we developed. Then it went in a slightly different direction.
SM: What was your favourite role before The Rings of Power?
CV: As soon as I finished drama school, I did this show called Medici in Italy. That was a real cool learning experience. I didn't know anything about screen acting because my whole training was in theatre.
Between season one and season two of Rings of Power, I did a show called The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which is probably my favourite role outside of Rings of Power. It's an adaptation of an Australian novel and it's in a really beautiful world. We had some amazing creatives working on the show. Sigourney Weaver was playing my mum, so that was very cool.
I played a really dark character. It was really interesting to be a part of. I mean, it's not light watching. It's not something you just turn on on a Sunday night. It's quite heavy. Beware!
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SM: How has your life changed since season one of Rings of Power?
CV: My life has changed dramatically since I've got the role because of the freedoms that a role like this provides you with. I've got more flexibility, financially and also creatively. When I was living in London before this role, since I finished drama school, I had years of working a million different part-time jobs and auditioning three times a week. I was incredibly lucky to even be auditioning. That has changed now. I don't feel like I'm scrambling to keep my head above water as much in London, with all the difficulties that living in a city like this brings.
SM: What part-time jobs did you have?
CV: I was a delivery driver for a plant company. I also delivered Christmas trees in a van. I would drive all over London, dropping off Christmas trees in people's houses and setting them up. Sometimes they're eight foot tall and you're having to climb up four flights of stairs. So it was quite a workout!
I did a lot of food sampling as well, but not the good kind of food sampling. I was the person offering food when you go to Sainsbury's or Whole Foods. "Try this!"
SM: I'd have thought that delivering Christmas trees was a good way of keeping your fitness up for acting roles!
CV: Exactly. It was perfect preparation. I didn't even need to go to the gym.
SM: Your profile has spiked. Do you often get recognised in the street?
CV: No, but I've only ever had good experiences when that does happen. It's normally at pubs. If people have been drinking, that's when they normally come up and want to have a chat.
SM: I read that to prepare for season one of Rings of Power, you went hiking for five days and learned to free dive. Did you have any preparation like that for season two?
CV: I learned to scuba dive this season. I did a lot of free diving in the first season, but this season I had to actually stay down at the bottom of the tank. I had to go on to a regulator. That was fun.
SM: Have you now read all of the Middle Earth books?
CV: I'm sure there is still a lot of stuff out there that I haven't read, but I've tried to read as much as possible! Of course, I've read the main The Lord of the Rings trilogy, obviously, and The Hobbit. And the main thing I've read a lot is The Silmarillion. Tolkien also has chapters within The Silmarillion that he's written books on in even greater detail. The story of Beren and Lúthien has Sauron in it, so that was one that I tried to read a lot.
Tolkien wrote a lot of personal and professional letters, which are fascinating to read because you see his perspective on his work and what influenced him - and most importantly for me - what he envisioned for his characters.
I think that's really important when you're doing an adaptation. I've been trying with Sauron to keep it as close to what I thought he wanted for the character. I didn't want to leave any stone unturned, knowing how much it matters to so many different people.
It's the beautiful thing about Tolkien, right? That there's such a vast world that so many people care about, which has been really special to be a part of.
SM: How do the viewpoints of the fandom affect your performance? Are you aware constantly of their expectations?
CV: Not particularly. I'm not really online in that sense. I don't find it very useful to look at things online because you get such a warped perspective, and I don't think it's the real world. But messages from the fans filter through to us all.
I think the second season definitely took on a lot of the feedback that we got from the first season. It's darker and it's gritty, and really action-packed and fast-paced. But within that, there's this story between Sauron and Celebrimbor, which is the first real deep dive into the lore of this period.
It's kind of like a psychological drama at points, because you see two characters duelling with their words. I hope that the fans enjoy it and then they can see the influence of their feedback on the show.
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SM: Is the elf wig itchy?
CV: It is by the end of the day! It's actually not the least comfortable thing that I wear. In the first and second season, I wear leather trousers. They always put me in water when I'm wearing these leather trousers and they get so heavy. They seem to stay waterlogged for days after I've worn them in the water, even in dry land scenes.
SM: Did you have to undertake any particularly wild stunts?
CV: One intense stunt that I'd never done before is when I was getting pulled across the underside of the tank on a wire, which was then fired by a hydraulic gun from outside of the tank. It yanked me pretty fast. I was spinning around! I had to hold my breath for that whole sequence.
SM: How do you relax on set?
CV: I often find it helpful to read. We had direct references from some chapters in Rings of Power. So I read those chapters quite often to find different moments that we could draw inspiration from. Often I'm fighting the urge to doze off because you get so tired. That's the art of doing this job - you have to be switched on and focused the whole day, but you also have to try and rest when you need to.
What I need is a hobby. I need to learn to knit. It's quite meditative and relaxing, right? I could watch the films over and over again while knitting. I could knit an Ent!
SM: Do you work out an additional backstory for your character?
CV: I have to colour in Sauron's life, if a demigod can have a life! It's about making it all make sense and trying to give the character this inner life that is complex and interesting. It's tricky because he's not human. I find it helpful to have some kind of human quality to draw upon. So the backstory was about trying to find an emotional throughline for the character.
The thing that I latched onto was that he had this great desire for order and perfection. Particularly in this point of Middle Earth history, he wants to rehabilitate and heal Middle Earth.
It's like Tolkien gave you a really beautiful sketch, and I'm trying to colour in the dots as best as I can based off the research that I've done. Sauron loves control and he thinks if everyone just did what he said, Middle Earth would be great.
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SM: Why do you think Sauron actually wants to conquer Middle Earth? What went wrong in his childhood to made him evolve into the big flaming eye?
CV: If he wants perfection, then he wants to rectify the parts of Middle Earth that are imperfect in his mind. Tolkien talks about him disliking wasteful friction.
He wants to get rid of any wars between men or within the elves and just have perfect unity. But it's ironic because the only way for him to do that is to start the huge wars. It's a Catch-22. Lots of huge battles are the means to an end for him, so he can impose his will on everyone, and ultimately everything can be at peace.
Way back in the very early chapters of The Silmarillion, he was a smith. He liked to craft beautiful things. I think his love for order comes from there. And as the original bad guy, Morgoth, started whispering in his ear, it gets corrupted and it's nurtured into this desire for power.
SM: Tolkien's work has a long history of being politicised in various ways. Hobbits were associated with the hippie movement, and far-right groups have also appropriated Tolkien's work. (E.g. Italian fascists in the 1940s.) Is that something that the Rings of Power creatives thought about?
CV: The thing about Tolkien is that it's timeless. It lasts forever. They're stories of good and evil and love, loss, hope and despair. All these things are universal and forever touch people's hearts and evoke feelings. So it is something throughout history that's been interpreted in so many different ways by so many different people.
We hope that our show is interpreted as a force of good in every aspect. We hope that it gives people an escape from whatever's going on in their life and doesn't make people feel alone or sad. They can watch this and find some solace.
SM: Because of JK Rowling, there's been a lot of discussion about whether fans or an author can claim ownership of a fandom. Do you think anyone owns Middle Earth?
CV: I think it's completely transient. No-one owns Middle Earth. It was something that the author created in their imagination. As an artist, you have no right to tell people how they should feel when they're watching you, or reading what you're writing.
You are not responsible for the meaning that other people take from your work. The experience of consuming art is that individuals will take from it what they will, and therefore there can be no ownership of any of this kind of stuff. That's what I love from the fan interactions in this show.
When you get to the politics of these great fantasy worlds, I think that there are pretty clear lines in terms of how people interpret some of this, whether it's the far-right groups or the pretty horrific racism that we've seen. There's, in my mind at least, a clear line in the sand where things are interpreted the wrong way. We stand for the complete opposite in our show.
SM: Annatar, the disguise that Sauron adopts in the books, is the Lord of Gifts. Did you receive any gifts on set?
CV: I received a small bust of my head from the big 3D scan of me in costume, which is very cool.
SM: And did you take any 'gifts' for yourself from the set?
CV: Did I steal anything? I definitely took a few copies of my ears, because you get new ears every day.
SM: And how many rings do you own?
CV: I actually think I only own one, which is kind of fitting for Sauron.
SM: And is there another famous book character you wish you would play?
CV: No, nothing. I've had enough of famous book characters to last me a lifetime, after playing this one. I can't even fathom thinking of another one. I don't really have ambition to do anything specific. I just want to be able to work as an actor for my whole career and do exciting and fulfilling projects. There's so much IP out there that's already been done, there are probably hardly any roles left!
The second season of The Rings of Power is now streaming on Prime Video.
