‘Lord of the Rings’ Brings Fiery Trailer — and an Orchestra — to Comic-Con

Aaron Couch
·5 min read

The Lord of the Rings, one of the foundational properties of modern geek culture, returned to San Diego Comic-Con Friday with Amazon showing off a new trailer for the megabudget The Rings of Power TV series. The panel kicked off with composer Bear McCeary and an orchestra (including a choir) performing music from the show for Hall H’s 6,500-strong crowd.

The pageantry set the tone for emcee (and noted Tolkien fan) Stephen Colbert to take the Comic-Con crowd to Middle-earth. The Rings of Power takes place during the Second Age, thousands of years before Peter Jackson’s films, and centers on the Rings of Power that allowed the Dark Lord Sauron to spread evil across Middle-earth. Colbert noted the Second Age is one of the least-explored eras in the Tolkien mythology. “It’s a story of loss,” said Colbert of the show, adding that he was struck by the “sincerity” and “love of this world” from showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay.

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Payne proved his Tolkien bona fides by speaking phrases in Elvish and went on to explain why the team decided to focus on the Second Age and the rise of Sauron.

“If we are going to tell 50 hours of story, we want to make it worth it,” said Payne. “We wanted to find a huge, Tolkien-ian mega-epic. Amazon were wonderfully crazy enough to say, ‘Yes, let’s do that.'”

Payne was particularly struck by the story of the fall of Númenor, which is akin to Tolkien’s Atlantis. “It’s deeply painful,” he said, but noted there might be “something we can learn” from it — given that it’s the story of a society divided. During the panel, one clip showed the grandeur of the island city that at the time was in its prime.

The team has been working on the series since 2018, with the creatives — including producer Lindsay Weber — poring over Tolkien’s appendices, sometimes expanding a few paragraphs into full-fledged backstories for characters and races, such as the harfoots — ancestors to the hobbits. McKay noted as fans of Tolkien, the team felt immense pressure to deliver. “We’ve been the fans who have been disappointed many, many times over — and we didn’t want to disappoint you guys.”

The panel also debuted a new trailer, which included what may be a balrog — the fiery foe that Gandalf faced in the first Jackson film. The footage had so much packed in that even Tolkien scholar Colbert couldn’t catch it all. Quipped the Late Show host: “I don’t know who the hell some of those people are.”

Of the expansive city sets, Weber noted, “a huge amount of it was in-camera. It was a labor of love of thousands and thousands of crewmembers,” said Weber.

The crowd also saw a clip showing off the unlikely friendship between Elrond (Robert Aramayo, taking over for Hugo Weaving in the Jackson films) and Durin (Owain Arthur). Elrond visits a dwarven mine and they participate in a test of endurance in which the two hammer rocks until they can hammer no longer. The cost of losing? Elrond will be banished from dwarven lands forever. If he wins? He will be granted a single boon from the dwarves.

Actor Sophia Nomvete got applause when Colbert acknowledged she plays the first female dwarf depicted onscreen. “Thank you all for the lovely response,” Nomvete said to the crowd. She then revealed she was just two days from giving birth when she auditioned for the role of Disa. She learned she’d landed the part when her daughter was 5 days old. She went to set when her daughter was 8 weeks old and noted her costume opened up so she could nurse her daughter. “That is the power of a female dwarf,” she said to big applause.

Later in the panel, another clip showed the harfoot characters coming across a mysterious man known as the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) who is in the middle of a fiery pit, as though he were a meteor crashing from the sky. “He has a deep sense of purpose,” said Weyman of his character. Colbert said he wouldn’t press the actor with his own theories on the Stranger’s identity (Gandalf? Sauron?).

As the panel neared its end, an action-heavy scene showed off the elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) helping free a group captured by goblin-like creatures, one of the moments the actor noted he studied martial arts to get right.

Galadriel actor Morfydd Clark noted she was 11 when the films came out and had many conversations and inside jokes with her family growing up about the character.

The last time the world of Tolkien journeyed to Hall H was in 2014 for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings prequel films. Those Hobbit films never reached the heights of Jackson’s Oscar-winning original Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Amazon is betting big on its new series, which is billed as the most expensive TV show of all time, with a pricetag of $465 million for just season one. (A chunk of that was the cost of acquiring the rights from Tolkien’s estate.)

The eight-episode first season will debut on Sept. 2. So far, despite the sprawling cast, it’s missing one obvious choice. A fan, during the Q&A portion, got the biggest applause of the entire panel when he asked the showrunners to commit to giving him a role.

Said the showrunners: “The answer is yes.”

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