If Rings of Power‘s first season was about setting the stage for coming darkness, its sophomore is about reckoning with that darkness already being here. Few people in Middle-earth are about to have a good time when the Amazon show returns, least of all Elven genius Celebrimbor, played by Charles Edwards. But what’s it like playing a character whose fate is already known by most of the audience?
The ruler of the Elven kingdoms in Eregion and a renowned forgemaster, Celebrimbor is known to Lord of the Rings fans for pretty much one thing only: being the one who inadvertently helps Sauron forge the rings of power, laying into motion the Dark Lord’s plans to dominate all life in Middle-earth and spark thousands of years of strife in the process. Anyone familiar with his story further than that, detailed in the Silmarillion and Tolkien’s other writings, also knows this goes even worse for Celebrimbor when the coming war between the Elves and Sauron breaks out. So we’ve known ever since he appeared in Rings of Power that Celebrimbor was a ticking time bomb of a character. But now that the ticking is getting louder and louder the closer we get to season two’s arrival. Edwards is embracing that he, and much of the audience, was always going to know where this was going.
“Obviously you know that’s coming and that’s part of the appeal of playing such a character,” Edwards said of Celebrimbor’s fate, speaking to io9 at a recent press event for Rings of Power‘s return. “It’s an extraordinary moment. But you’re not factoring that in the moment, of course, because the character doesn’t know that that’s happening. It’s quite a delicious position to be in because the actor knows where it’s going, but the character doesn’t. So you can relish it, and relish his innocence and vulnerability and bafflement knowing the whole time where he’s headed.”
For Edwards, this meant playing up a lot of Celebrimbor’s innocence in the coming season—even if, from the get-go, the audience knows that the mysterious figure that comes knocking to help him, Annatar, is Sauron in disguise. “I just tried, Charlie [Vickers, who plays Sauron and his disguised forms of Halbrand and Annatar] was saying this earlier, you just try and play the truth of this at all times. Sauron messes with his head, and that takes him down all kinds of dark alleyways. But of course he has no idea where his head is. He’s hoping this will be a fruitful collaboration.”
We’ll see how fruitful or otherwise Celebrimbor’s doomed pact really is when The Rings of Power returns to Amazon Prime Video on August 29.
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