‘The Rings Of Power’ Showrunners Defend Decision To Humanize Orcs: “We Feel Like This Goes Straight Back To Tolkien”
In the opinion of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners, their Season 2 decision to ‘humanize’ the Dark Lord’s orc armies is far from controversial because not only does the change provide better opportunities for storytelling, but it also falls directly in line with Tolkien’s writings.
As seen in the series’ third (and currently latest) episode, The Eagle and The Sceptre, rather than being portrayed as the cruel species depicted by J.R.R. Tolkien himself – “[The Orcs] hated everybody and everything, and particularly the orderly and prosperous,” wrote the author in The Hobbit” – the Orcs in The Rings of Power are instead shown as brutal but oppressed foot soldiers, their lives concerned not just with war and pillaging, but also achieving a future where their families can exist as more than tools for Lord Sauron to use in service of his ambitions.
“The preparations are nearly complete, Lord-father,” an orc by the name of Glüg at one point tells Adar. “But…we are safe here. We have a home. Must we go to war again? You told me Sauron was dead. Let us leave him that way.”
“Trust me,” the corrupted elf responds, “my son, when I tell you that we will never truly be safe, until we’ve made certain Sauron is no more.”
And while many fans were understandably taken aback by this absolutely bizarre script-flipping regarding the Orcs’ existence, The Rings of Power showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne are standing by their creative decision.
Pressed for their reasoning behind this choice during an August 30th interview with Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr., Payne asserted, “From the beginning of this season, we talked about the idea of having with an arc, and we feel like this goes straight back to Tolkien.”
“You read the books and you get these blips of moments where orcs are kind of on their own and they’re saying, ‘Hey, what if one day there could be a place just for us, we could have our own little land or our own little cottage by the sea, so to speak, where they have dreams, they have aspirations, they don’t just want to be mindless killing machines,'” he continued. “We tried to take that a step further and continue to individuate them and dramatize what their desires and ambitions might be. And we were also always fascinated by the idea that the orcs are fallen elves. Tolkien has this idea that evil can’t create anything, it can only corrupt. That the elves, these amazing, beautiful creatures could be corrupted into the orcs was fascinating to us.”
“And so the idea of Adar as the missing link between the two to get his story as who he was as an elf and how and why he was turned, and then to see where that could lead him in terms of being the father of an entire race, that felt really compelling to us,” said Payne. “We get some of those answers filled in for us this season and then get to see how again, those benevolent desires can ultimately lead to tragic ends.”
Building upon his partner’s thoughts, McKay then noted, “I would just add that even when we were writing movies, I think JD and I, we spend an enormous amount of time and put an enormous amount of thought into our villains.”
“Just going back to [Alfred] Hitchcock, this line that I love that he said in some interview where he talked about the movies he was most proud of. It was always because he had the most compelling villains and he pointed to Claude Rains in Notorious, as this Nazi hiding in South America,” he further posited. “He’s absolutely evil, but you understand what’s motivating him, which makes him not less scary, but more scary sometimes. Villains are motivated by things that in their own heads make them think they’re the hero of their own story. And that can make for really compelling drama. And so orcs who have dimension, who have things they care about, benefits all the stories in our mind.”
For those hoping to learn more information about the fight for Orc rights, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 is now streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime.
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