LOTR: Rings Of Power Showrunners On Deviating From The Books And Rumors About Sex And Violence

Ahead of the first trailer for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show, The Rings of Power, this weekend at the Super Bowl, Vanity Fair has published new images of the show and interviews with the key creatives. Among the many interesting stories is how the show will deviate greatly from the novels it’s based on in some key ways. Additionally, the showrunners discussed the show’s tone in response to rumors about Game of Thrones-levels of sex and violence.

The show will compress certain events, like Sauron’s rise to power and resurrection, which was understood to take place over thousands of years. In the show, it will be presented as a single point in time. According to the report, this is the “biggest deviation from the text” in the entire series.

Showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne said they had to speak with the Tolkien estate about such a drastic change. But the alternative would have been that certain major characters might not get introduced until Season 4, and that wouldn’t work. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” Payne said. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”