EXCLUSIVE | Prime Video's 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2' showrunner JD Payne: 'Season two is broader, deeper, and bigger because...'

Prime Video’s ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2’ showrunner JD Payne spoke about season two in an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the world they have created as the story moves forward, and his actors Megan and Markella.

Edited excerpts from the interview with the showrunner in Singapore

How does it feel to get immersed into the world of Tolkien and Middle Earth again?

It’s wonderful. Patrick, my show’s co-runner spend most of our time in Middle Earth because we are either doing writing, production or pre-production or going out and promoting the show. So for us, the Middle Earth adventure never stops.

What about your actors and the way they emote through their characters?

Megan and Markella do it absolutely amazingly. I don’t want to embarrass both of them but I’ll share an experience of shooting from season one. Ja Bayona was directing Markella and they were doing a particularly emotional scene, and he said ‘Okay, let’s go ahead and do it,’ and she did it. She wept during the first take and he said, “25% less emotional.” She then had a single tear come out. And in the next take, her eyes brimmed with tears but didn’t have any. She was calibrating it to such an amazing degree. And I was like, ‘I don’t know how you have such degrees of emotional variation.’ But I was impressed. The credit goes to the environment created on the sets in season one and two.

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What do you do to keep the audiences engaged?

By virtue of being the second part of the story, the whole world has been set up now and they know the different characters and different storylines. So now, we can just start season two in a shot. We are going broader, deeper, and bigger. Broader because we are now going to explore far deeper worlds because the psychology of the characters is so complex, and bigger because of the creatures and their battles that we have. There are creatures all over and it takes three episodes for their battle to get complete.