When the 2023 Creative Arts Emmy Award nominations were announced this July, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” received a healthy six nominations, for categories like Best Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes, Best Prosthetics Makeup, and Best Sound Editing for a One Hour Program. But for a lot of the crafts team behind the show, winning awards wasn’t the main draw to the series — it was getting to geek out about bringing J.R.R Tolkien’s iconic fantasy franchise back to the screen with a whole new vision.
“We all got drawn into the project because everyone categorically loves the material,” series costume designer Kate Hawley said during an IndieWire Consider This panel. “So whether you found that initially through books or the films, I through both as a child, the door and the books opened to a world of such magic and creativity. And I think this was a common story I hear everywhere, even my crew who worked with me. So I think all of us became geeks in our own way, even before we joined the project.”
Hawley was joined by several fellow Emmy nominees from “The Rings of Power” crafts team, including prosthetics makeup artists Dan Perry and Jason Docherty, sound editors Robert Stambler and Damian Del Borrello, and VFX artists Jason Smith and Ron Ames. In a conversation with IndieWire Awards Editor Marcus Jones, the seven discussed joining “The Rings of Power,” their connection with the original books and the beloved Peter Jackson film adaptations, and bringing the world of Middle-Earth to television.
Rather than retelling the story of Tolkien’s original “Lord of the Rings” novel, “The Rings of Power” is based on a short passage from the epic’s appendices about the rise of the dark lord Sauron. According to Smith and Ames, while they were using VFX to flesh out the world, they looked to other sources for inspiration, especially the original reference points for Tolkien. Hawley helped them through a “museum” she curated of art and sources that Tolkien originally took inspiration from. (Read more about how the crafts team created Khazad-Dum here.
“[Tolkien] pulled from Norse mythology, he pulled from history,” Smith said. “We would find that inspiration wherever we could frankly.”
“Also, we had a Tolkien expert on staff, who had every passage,” Ames said. “If we had a question about history, or where anything came from, we went directly to the source, and we’d ask the question, and a couple hours later there’d be 30 pages from five different sources. So it was available to us in a whole different array.”
For sound editors Stambler and Borrello, the two said that they considered influences from a wide variety of films and genres, such as their shared favorite-sounding film “Apocalypse Now,” and received guidance from the showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay in shaping the soundscapes of “Rings of Power.”
“The original ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, that’s really the benchmark,” Stambler said. “And so we knew we had to be as good or better, and there’s something freeing about having examples of how to do something correctly.”
“One thing that was quite unique and amazing and empowering for us on this show was just the ability to iterate so many times,” Borrello said, referring to the process of designing sounds for different monsters featured in the show. “It’s like a refining process that was quite special for this project, and was really what we needed.”
For prosthetic makeup artists Perry and Docherty, although their flashiest work was with the Orcs, they said that some of their most challenging work was in the subtler makeup for the characters, including the much more humanoid elves.
“You wouldn’t believe the complexity that can go into just creating some ear tips for an Elven character,” Docherty said. “To get those to flow well with a person’s features. You know, one of the hardest things in prosthetics is plonk a nose in the middle of a person’s face and try and create a character out of that. There was so much of that on the project too, just getting those nuances right, and designs have to change just because they have to flow with the actor.”
Like Docherty and a few other team members, Perry came to the new show with original “Lord of the Rings” film experience, having worked as a prosthetics makeup team member on the first trilogy and the last two “Hobbit” films. He said because of his long-term relationship with the franchise, his goals became more about improving upon his prior work on the franchise.
“Having worked on the other shows or films, you’ve been down that road before, but you’re always trying to do something new and something innovative, and just something that hasn’t been seen before, something the fans might pick up on,” Perry said. “I guess you’re working to try and impress the fans, but also impress yourself.”
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Season 1 is currently streaming on Prime Video. Season 2 is scheduled to premiere in 2024. The full interview with the crafts team can be watched above. And learn more about the making of the series in IndieWire’s Deep Dive series here.
IndieWire’s Consider This Conversations bring together the cast and creative team members of television’s most prestigious shows to discuss some of the best art and craft of TV production of 2023.
