In the book version of The CompanionsGandalf forbids anyone from calling Frodo “the Lord of the Rings.” This sinister honorific is reserved exclusively for Sauron, who goes by many names throughout Tolkien’s works: the Necromancer, the Lidless Eye, the Dark Lord, the Lord of Mordor, and the Nameless One. But canonically, he also has many faces. He began life as Mairon sometime in the First Age of Middle-earth, and when he allied himself with another Dark Lord, Morgoth, he gradually acquired a wide range of powers, including the ability to change his shape into that of a snake, a vampire, and a werewolf, among others.
In The Rings of Power We may not see a vampire version of Sauron in Season 2, but the series will reveal a previously unknown face of the Ringmaker. No major spoilers.
A second Sauron actor revealed
Before the start of The Rings of Power As for Season 2, Prime Video has released a preview revealing that the new season will feature a flashback scene in which a different actor – not Charlie Vickers – plays Sauron in a flashback. That actor is Jack Lowden, who plays Sauron in a flashback that takes place, as Lowden says, “a thousand years before the first season.”
While we can’t reveal exactly what happens in this flashback, those who have seen Season 1 already know that Sauron must somehow assume his Half-Rim form, played by Vickers. Although Half-Rim was a new creation for the Prime Video series, the idea that Sauron could change his form is embedded in the appendices of The Return of the King but also appears memorably in “Of Beren and Lúthien”, a section of The Silmarillion. And while The Rings of Power does not adapt The Silmarillion directly, the new season tackles Sauron’s dark shapeshifting magic much more directly. And with the introduction of the younger version of Jack Lowden, we get a brief glimpse of Sauron at the beginning of the Second Age.
Sauron’s most important face
Charlie Vickers as “Annatar”, the elf form of Sauron.
Amazon
While the new, younger Sauron in the flashback will add a new dimension to the character’s origins, The Rings of Powerthe present tense of the show not only brings back Charlie Vickers in the human form of Halbrand, but also tasks the actor with the role of Annatar, another “beautiful form” of Sauron, who is used to trick the elves into making more rings. In season 1 The Rings of Power got around this part of the story by having Halbrand trick Celebrimbor into creating the three Elven Rings. But because Galadriel knows that Halbrand is Sauron, the Dark Lord is forced to try out a different face in Season 2.
For this reason, Vickers will also play Annatar, who appears to be one of the elves, but who the audience knows is also Sauron. To be clear, this level of Sauron’s shapeshifting has never been seen in any film adaptation of Lord of the rings, not even in Rings of Power Season 1. During Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit The trilogy gave us the necromancer form of Sauron, which is pretty much the different and radical version that we have seen of him on screen, before Rings of Power.
But now we get three Saurons in one season. Who knows, maybe with this level of shapeshifting the Dark Lord will turn into a vampire.
