Amazon’s long-awaited “The Lord of the Rings” TV series “The Rings of Power” makes its epic debut with a two-episode launch on Sept. 2, the Friday before Labor Day weekend. A big-budget drama that has been years in the making, the story centers on the Second Age of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a time not yet explored on screen and thus likely not familiar to the casual “Lord of the Rings” fan — and certainly not to those entirely new to this world of elves, ents, dwarves, harfoots, orcs and humans, just to name a few.
With that in mind, Variety interviewed 18 out of the 23 series regulars that star on “The Rings of Power” in order to give readers a primer on both the actors themselves, as well as the characters they will be playing on the series from showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay.
Of course, in keeping with the spirit of Tolkien, we asked more than one whimsical question along the way.