The Full Creative Team Behind Amazon's THE LORD OF THE RINGS Series Has Been Revealed
Amazon Studios has announced the full creative team who will be writing and producing their highly anticipated Lord of the Rings series and there’s a lot of great talent here! With a team like this, they are sure to deliver a series that Tolkien fans will love.
It was already announced that Lindsey Weber (10 Cloverfield Lane), Bruce Richmond (Game of Thrones), Gene Kelly (Boardwalk Empire), and Amazon’s former head of genre programming Sharon Tal Yguado would be executive producers on the series. They will no be joined by writer and executive producer Gennifer Hutchison (Breaking Bad); writer and executive producer Jason Cahill (The Sopranos); writer and executive producer Justin Doble (Stranger Things); consulting producers Bryan Cogman (Game of Thrones) and Stephany Folsom (Toy Story 4); producer Ron Ames (The Aviator); writer and co-producer Helen Shang (Hannibal); and writing consultant Glenise Mullins.
It was also announced that project was bringing on costume designer Kate Hawley (Suicide Squad); production designer Rick Heinrichs (Star Wars: The Last Jedi); visual effects supervisor Jason Smith (The Revenant); Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey; and illustrator and concept artist John Howe.
Star Trek 4 writers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay will serve as the showrunners and director J.A. Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, A Monster Calls, The Orphanage) will direct the first two episodes and executive produce along with his partner Belén Atienza. It was also recently reported that the first actor cast in the series was Markella Kavenagh.
Payne and McKay had this to say in a statement:
“This team is our Fellowship – assembled from around the world, all walking the road together to try and accomplish something far greater than any of us could on our own. We feel humbled and extremely lucky to be surrounded by such inspiring and talented women and men.”
This certainly is an impressive team of behind-the-scenes talent and I can’t wait to see what it delivers! Not much is known about the series, but we do know it will involve new stories preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Rings. The show’s official Twitter account sent out an image of a map teasing the setting and along with two messages: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie,” as well as “Welcome to the Second Age.”
In the Tolkien mythology, the Second Age was the time in which the Rings of Power, including Sauron’s One Ring, came into existence. It was also teases that the film could involve the island of Numenor.
Numenor was a kingdom of men established on an island brought up out of the sea by the Valar in the early Second Age after the final ruin of Beleriand, and was where the Númenoreans originated from. It was a “gift to Men. It was also called Elenna or the Isle of Elenna ("Starwards") because the Dúnedain were led to it by the star of Eärendil, and because the island was in the shape of a five-pointed star.”
The men of Numenor lived in peace, and they were forbidden by the Valar “from sailing so far westward that Númenor was no longer visible, for fear that they would come upon the Undying Lands, to which men could not come.”
They ended up resenting Valar and their ban, and the Númenóreans wanted to break free and explore the world and wanted everlasting life. “They tried to compensate this by going eastward and colonizing large parts of Middle-earth, first in a friendly way, but later as tyrants. Soon the Númenóreans came to rule a great but terrorizing maritime empire that had no rival, but a few (the Faithful) remained loyal to the Valar and friendly to the elves.”
They ended up taking over sections of Middle Earth, and with Sauron on the rise, Numenor would meet its tragic downfall down the line, but its survivors would go on to create the kingdoms of Armor and Gondor.