JD Payne and Patrick McKay recently spoke to Total Film about casting Charlie Vickers as Halbrand, who has just been revealed to be Sauron. The showrunners pointed out that they wanted to introduce Halbrand as someone who is connected to Galadriel to prove something that has been teased in The Lord of the Rings. “One of the initial sparks and ideas and, in our opinion, right or wrong, a reason to do the entire show, is that Galadriel talks about Sauron in the books in a way that indicates that she knew him really well,” McKay said.
Payne quotes Galadriel’s line from The Fellowship of the Ring, “I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves, and he gropes ever to see me and my thoughts. But still, the door is shut.” “The idea of ‘still the door is shut’, that he’s been reaching after her for a long time, and there’s this sense of back and forth between them – we found that endlessly fascinating,” Payne continues. “And we said, ‘There’s an entire history between them. He’s not just some eye in the sky, who’s looking at it from afar, there’s a relationship. And so, how could you have a relationship between the Dark Lord and Galadriel, in a way that lets them get to an interesting place?” He continues, “If she knew it was him from the beginning, obviously she would reject him out of hand, because we know from the legendarium that he was responsible for her brother’s death. We know that he has this desire to heal the world, and she has this heroic desire to fix the world. So if we could put them in parallel to each other without exactly knowing who he was, there was an opportunity there.” It’s an interesting way to present the story and it made for a shocking reveal of Halbrand’s identity in the Rings of Power finale.
