“There’s a lot going on right now,” The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power co-showrunner Patrick McKay told me on the set in England in August 2025.
At the moment, McKay is catching his breath as the crew resets to shoot a quiet but key moment from the Prime Video series’ upcoming third season. The massive production has taken over a large section of Windsor Great Park, which has been used as an outdoor setting for numerous films in the past, including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
It’s a gargantuan setup, with dozens of vehicles, tents and trailers nearby, along with a small army of actors in full Orc and Elvish regalia. And it happens to be just one aspect of a massive logistical puzzle that has to happen to make the show possible. “It’s a [huge] production every time we do this. We have four units running right now, including ours,” notes McKay. “One unit is over in a place called Frensham (about 25 miles south of Windsor), shooting [a scene] with the dwarf characters. Then we have another unit that is shooting various sundry action sequences back at Shepperton Studios, and a fourth unit is prepping [scenes] we will be shooting in a few weeks.”
When it returns for its third season on November 11, Rings of Power will be making a significant time jump in the storyline. Season 3 will be set five years after the events of Season 2, when Sauron did away with his disguise and sent the Elves into retreat as his armies overran Middle-earth. McKay embraced making such a pronounced jump in the narrative timeline, because it drops the viewer right in the center of the action, making them catch up to the story.
“We really love the idea of throwing the viewer in in a way that is a completely fresh start. J.D. Payne, my co-showrunner and I, we’re huge admirers of shows that have done this kind of [time jump] before, like Battlestar Galactica and Halt and Catch Fire,” he says. “That can be really fun for a viewer.”
According to McKay, it’s also an opportunity to do a soft reboot and send the series in a new direction. “Hopefully, this season is a great jumping-on point for fans,” he says. “And it truly starts with people talking about the One Ring.”
He admits that filming the first two seasons back to back was an enormous strain on everyone involved, and believes the upcoming season will benefit from having more breathing room. “I think our goal for Season 3 is really to blow the doors off the hinges,” McKay says. “We’re really proud of Seasons One and Two, but …for us, now, in some ways, we’re starting a whole new story. This is turning the page on the show.”
The showrunners have already benefited from the fact that their series is not based on a detailed narrative like The Fellowship of the Ring or The Hobbit. While it’s a prequel to the LOTR stories set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, Rings of Power is not a direct adaptation of any single Tolkien work; instead it draws mainly on Tolkien’s background lore and appendices for inspiration. That has allowed the show’s creatives to forge their own path. Tolkien himself, in a correspondence published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, said this era in Middle-earth was a dark age, where “not very much of its history is (or need be) told. “
“There’s lots of room for original characters in this era of the mythology,” McKay says about the breathing room the creative team has for the series. “Tolkien gave us a very broad outline … an outline that sometimes contradicts itself depending on where you’re reading.”
McKay and Payne enjoy a fairly wide berth with which to craft the story that drives the series. They’ve introduced several new concepts and characters, one of the most notable being Adar, an integral figure in the first two seasons of Rings of Power. Adar was an Elf who was corrupted and twisted by Morgoth into being one of the first Orcs. He viewed the Orcs as his children, and they viewed him as their Lord-father. He was ultimately betrayed and killed by a band of Orcs loyal to Sauron in the Season 2 finale, Shadow and Flame.
Delivering a new character like Adar into Middle-earth involves a certain process which involves discussions with Tolkien scholar Carl F. Hostetter, who serves as a linguist and consultant on the series. “Usually we change the name to fit more the conventions of how he used his accenting and the types of sounds he would use and everything else,” McKay says. “We’re inventing in, hopefully, a way that is really informed.”
The presentation of the Orcs is one of the most notable detours the series takes from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. In the films, the Orcs are mainly a collective of terror and brute force. By that time period in the Rings mythos, they have devolved into an existence of serving as Sauron’s blunt instruments of war and destruction.
In Rings of Power, Orcs are not simply rampaging monsters. They are more complex, with distinct personalities and deeply personal motivations. Fans even got a glimpse of an Orc family last season when we met the Orc Glûg, his wife and child. Of course, Sauron viciously kills Glûg to sow distrust among the other Orcs and turn them against Adar. But that tragic ending underscores how in the Second Age, the Orcs are more than just mindless cannon fodder.
The expansion of the Orcs as a more complicated aspect of Middle-earth continues in Season 3 as we are introduced to the character of Marnouk, an Orc unlike any we’ve ever seen in a Tolkien adaptation. He appears in Rivendell claiming to be a defector from Sauron’s army who wants to help the Elves fight back. “He claims to know all kinds of things about Sauron’s strategy and reveals to the Elves that Sauron is trying to make the One Ring,” says McKay. “And if he succeeds, he will defeat everyone, including the Orcs, because the One Ring will now make them subservient to him, slaves to him forever, and there’ll never be another Orc rebellion like Adar, who died last season, led.”
Marnouk is a character meant to challenge long-held perceptions of Orcs. He’s such a departure from past depictions that within the production, Marnouk has picked up the catchy nickname, “the Orc with an arc.”
IGN was the only media outlet on set for the filming of key moments of an episode in Season 3 where Marnouk is being escorted by Galadriel and Arondir. There is a tension and uncertainty hovering above the trio’s interactions, notes the episode’s director, Sanaa Hamri, that viewers won’t know how to feel about him at first.
“I have a real soft spot for this Orc,” admits Hamri. “I think the audience is going to be really torn about Marnouk.”
Adam Young, the actor who portrays the new Orc, says having the audience question Marnouk’s true purpose is a central element of his performance. “We were working out early on what was his incentive? What’s his purpose for being here? Is he good, is he bad?,” Young notes.
During the scenes I witnessed, there is noticeable tension as Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and especially Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cordova) are suspicious of their travel companion, who claims to know the location of the one remaining element Sauron needs to create the One Ring. That unease is heightened by certain moments, such as the one I saw filmed. It’s a sequence where the group comes across a field littered with the corpses of Elves. Marnouk urges the Elves to take a detour, a suggestion that is met with understandable suspicion. There are also moments of levity that add a new layer to the complex relationship between the three; Arondir, besides being wary of Marnouk, is visibly annoyed by the Orc’s constant chatter.
“He’s a wizard with words. He’s a word spiller,” Young says. “It’s just been really fun to play around with him and come and join Miv and Ismael on that journey and come into the family.”
The trio seem like an intentional callback to another unlikely group of travelers from Rings lore. “It’s a little bit like Frodo, Sam and Gollum,” McKay admits. “Galadriel had this very grudging respect that developed between her and Adar so she’s maybe a little more willing to maybe believe there’s something to what Marnouk is saying.”
But while Galadriel may be willing to give the Orc a chance to prove himself, her Elven partner is not. “Arondir’s interactions with Orcs have been terrible. They basically killed the woman he loved,” McKay points out. “So he’s like, ‘I don’t believe him. I think it’s a lie.’ And so you’ve got this dynamic from the three of them where the audience will constantly not be sure that they can trust this guy. Is he out for himself? Is he working on Sauron’s [behalf]? And that becomes a journey of a big part of the season, and there’s quite a few twists and turns along the way.”
The misdirection Marnouk’s character conveys at different points meant the show’s prosthetics department, led by multiple Emmy Award winner Barry Gower, had their work cut out for them.
“We knew he was going to have an awful lot of dialogue and there was going to be a lot of exposure to his face, so he would need to convey a lot of emotion [through his facial expressions],” notes Gower. “It dictated how we designed his prosthetics.”
Gower is no stranger to massive productions, having worked on blockbuster series like Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and The Last of Us. Rings of Power has posed its own unique challenges with regards to the sheer number of different prosthetic designs used onscreen. Gower’s crew has amassed a trove of Orc character designs since Rings debuted. In fact, for the epic Siege of Eregion that served as the climactic battle to the second season, nearly 1,700 different Orc makeup designs were created. And if you’re wondering how they can possibly not repeat themselves while having to create so many Orc looks, well … Gower and his team had the same concern.
So after production wrapped on Season 2, they created a library of different Orc designs, featuring character designs as well as a variety of details such as different types of hair, contact lenses and dentures. That way they can cobble together different looks depending on the needs of the storyline.
“So Season 2 we didn’t have that catalog to start off with. We started from the ground upwards and we did a lot of concept art and design and did some three-dimensional sculptures to distinguish these characters,” Gower says. “This time we’ve got this catalog and we can go to the showrunners and say, ‘What about this guy from last year, something on a variation of this with a little bit of this?’ So, it’s actually really lovely that we’ve got all this.”
The type of material used for Orc prosthetics on Rings of Power varies by necessity. Due to the sheer number of Orc characters who show up during a big battle sequence, i.e. stunt actors and background players, the prosthetics are often an assembly of foam latex pieces from 10 to 15 different Orc designs. “We can take the forehead from one and put it with the cheeks of another and the nose of one and mix and match them as such, like a jigsaw puzzle,” says Gower.
For Marnouk, Gower and his crew had to create an entirely new design to accommodate his performance. It began with a 3D scan of the actor, which was then used to create a clay maquette of the character. That maquette is then used as the blueprint to sculpt the full-scale makeup.
“With somebody like Adam, it’s a bespoke make-up, made particularly for Adam Young,” he says. “And it’s made out of a silicon gel material. Very, very flexible, very, very soft. But we actually sculpted and made the application very thin.”
“So even though he’s got a big Orc-like nose and big Orc ears and he’s got an Orc chin, what have you, we’ve made sure that the forehead in particular and the cheeks were very thin and could give Adam a lot of movement,” Gower adds. “So everything that he did with his performance would show through the application, basically.”
There is a brief but key moment in the scene I saw being filmed where Marnouk tells his escorts/captors, “I give you my word” as he tries to convince them he’s telling the truth about the path he wants to take. It’s a close-up shot, and the emotion in the delivery is amplified by the incredible detail in Young’s prosthetics makeup. The whites of Young’s eyes stand out surrounded by the green of the Orc prosthetics, and the exposed bone and scars complement the look. I should note that Young has crystal-blue eyes in real life, so he also has to wear contact lenses to complete his Orc look.
“He’s very emotive, so in a way it really is like a second skin for him,” Gower says. “But it was just really important chatting with the showrunners that he was able to convey as wide a range of emotions as possible because he looks really sinister and evil in some points, And he looks very surprised and very joyful in some shots as well. We just had to make sure that Adam was never going to be fighting the make-up to convey his performance.”
I talked with Young in-between takes while he was in full makeup, in the supply center section of the production the crew affectionately call ‘Orc-ia.’. Getting used to the prosthetics and figuring out how to convey certain expressions without overdoing it took some time. “It’s been a lot of me in the mirror looking at myself every day and figuring it all out,” Young says. “I mean, I was pretty blown away by how much movement and emotion I could get out of it by not actually doing a lot. And once I get the teeth in, once I get the lenses in, it’s great.”
The London-based actor, whose credits include The Witcher: Blood Origin, Masters of the Air, and EastEnders, recalls getting the news that he’d landed the role during the Christmas holiday. He then immediately began immersing himself in Rings lore, which he admits he was not that familiar with.
“I’d actually never read the books and so I just [threw] myself into the Tolkien world and Silmarillion and all of that,” Young says. “It was really nice to just have a bit of time to actually jump into that and the language and the lore. It’s huge.”
It didn’t take long for the actor to notice the parallels between his character stepping into the story and Young’s arrival on a show where much of the cast and crew have been together for several years.
“I was just saying to [my publicist] the other day that me as Adam coming into the Rings family and me as the character coming into that narrative was a … similar thing, in my head,” he says. “It felt quite distant at first, and then I got to know everyone.”
Young is well aware of the plum opportunity he has, coming into a beloved franchise like Lord of the Rings and getting to portray a different side of a character that has often been one-dimensional. He says the questions the audience will have about Marnouk when Season 3 debuts are the same ones he had to figure out when he landed the role.
“Is he good, is he bad? Do we know? Is he smarter than he makes out? And what’s his drive? He’s coming out of Sauron’s world … I don’t want to say too much on that, but what’s his purpose?,” says Young. “That’s been a lot of fun to play around with. And for the audience, it’s working out whether they trust him. And they will see as the show goes on, he’s a tough nut to crack.”