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Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 7! Turn back now if you have not seen the latest installment in Amazon's epic series.
Adar, the villain of The Rings of Power's first season, is something quite new in Middle-earth. While Tolkien wrote about the origins of Orcs – that they were once Elves twisted by the evil Morgoth – the author never detailed what one of those ancient creatures would look like. However, the showrunners behind Amazon's new series took Tolkien's words as inspiration to create the creature who haunts The Southlands in The Rings of Power.
"Tolkien talks about the creation of the Orcs, and there's a couple of different possible origin stories for them," Payne says. "The one that really felt fascinating to us was the idea that they are corrupted Elves. And so we said, 'What is that like? How does that process work? And what if we were to meet one of those Elves? Who was the first, or one of the first, and were still in Mordor?' They were the fathers of the entire Orc race and that idea felt so just pregnant with possibilities to us. As we started developing the character Adar, which literally means father, we said, 'Well, what would it be like?' You would get this ancient character who had been around, almost since the very beginning. He would have this weight of days, and years and millennia on his brow.
"As we went to design work, we ranged all over the place, we did some that were far more Orcish and nightmarish, where he had gone almost full Orc. And then some of them were almost nothing at all – he was basically an Alpha with just little deviations. Eventually, we settled here, where you could definitely tell that he's Elvish, you can see his ears, you can see the structure in his face, there's a certain beauty about it, but it's a fallen beauty. We then worked with the actor, Joseph Mawle, to find how he would connect and relate to the character.
"And then there's that relationship with Galadriel, because she's also a very ancient Elf. She's been around for a long, long time, and has also been touched by darkness, as he says, that they're looking at each other as if across a mirror, and they're able to call each other out on certain parts of their characters."
McKay adds that his favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie is Notorious, and its villain partly inspired Adar. In the movie, Claude Rains plays a Nazi with a few secrets. He falls in love with Ingrid Bergman, who's an undercover spy, and they get married. The movie shows exactly what happens when you get caught spying on the Nazis, and Rains' character ends up in a precarious situation where he realizes his wife is a spy.
"He's a villain who is absolutely ruthless and will kill the woman he loves, but it's all coming from a place where you understand why it is so important to him [not to get caught]," says McKay. "That doesn't make him a weaker villain; it makes him a stronger villain, because you understand why the stakes are so high. And we certainly aspire to a bad guy who has a motive that, from his point of view, he's the hero. One of the many reasons we like watching this bad guy is for that reason."
For some more speculation on what's to come in The Rings of Power, here's our piece on the true identity of Sauron.
