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British heatwaves and massive, thick dwarven beards, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t mix well together.
We’re inside a soundstage at Shepperton Studios in late June for Season 3 of Prime Video’s “The Lord of the Rings:
The Rings of Power,” and with mercury levels topping 90 degrees and wildfire alerts across Greater London, the residents of the dwarf kingdom of Khazad-dûm are facing a dastardly new villain: sweat.
But help is at hand, literally. Almost every cast and crew member, numbering in the hundreds, is holding a mini fan. If a fan isn’t spotted in the back of a shot (remember the “Game of Thrones” coffee cup?), it’ll be a miracle.
Cameras are getting ready to roll, and before Owain Arthur — who plays newly crowned dwarf King Durin IV — steps onto a set that looks like it been carved out of the Misty Mountains themselves, one assistant holds a mini fan directly in front his face while another points one at the back of his neck.
For all the valiant efforts, the battle against the intense heat isn’t always victorious.
“Eddie Marsan’s beard suddenly peeled off in a close-up yesterday,” notes hair and make-up designer Flora Moody. “We’re really try to keep things on, but it’s a struggle — everyone’s just sweating so much.”
While few may have foreseen an early summer heatwave such as this, Moody hasn’t exactly helped matters. To reflect Season 3 jumping ahead five years after Season 2, she upped the volume of on-screen hair considerably.
“I think this is one of the hairiest shows,” she suggests. As a result, the dwarf beards — made of yak tail hair (quite itchy, apparently) — are bulkier, longer and often more elaborate plaited. Crucially, they’re heavier, so when the glue holding them in place mixes with sweat, they are more liable to slip off.
It’s not any easier for the prosthetics team, which is desperately trying to stop the same fate as Marsan’s beard happening to their oversized dwarven noses and ears.
“When you’re getting somebody into a thick layer of rubber and then covering them in really heavy leather costumes, they’re just walking saunas,” says Barrie Gower, who, alongside his wife Sarah Gower, has overseen the creation of the thousands of body parts being used across the show. “We’re probably one of the most irritating departments for the actors and supporting artists, because we spend the entire day walking around and prodding their faces to try to preventing things from peeling off them.”
Inside Khazad-dûm, more elaborate dwarven cooling technologies have also been deployed.
“We had ice vests,” notes Marsan, speaking after the shoot. The veteran actor joins “Rings of Power” Season three as Thrain — a power-hungry dwarf looking to claim the throne from his younger brother Durin IV (who was only given it following the climactic finale of Season 2, when his dad sacrificed himself to keep a balrog at bay).
Powered by battery, the thin ice vests “have water channels, a little bit like an electric blanket,” says costume designer Libby Dempster, upped to lead for Season 3 and also part of the fight to hold back sweat. “You plug them in between takes and they’re attached to an ice pack.”
But, of course, ice packs didn’t prevent Marsan’s beard-slip moment.
A short electric buggy ride away outside another soundstage, a group of orcs — fully kitted out in scraggly armor, prosthetic faces and terrifying fake eyes are fanning themselves under a tiny amount of shade. Asked how they’re coping, one — almost scripted — bellows: “It’s hotter than the fiery pits of Mordor!”
The heatwave is, of course, being felt across the whole of Middle-earth. But the elves — less weighed down by volumous hair and with wardrobes not so focussed on bulk — aren’t facing quite the same issue. “We didn’t suffer as much as others,” notes Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel, after the shoot. However, she says the costume department did find it tricky to “keep the elves looking effortlessly cool while we’re all a bit a sweaty and red.”
That said, Robert Aramayo, playing Elrond, got away with it almost entirely. “He’s the luckiest of the elves, because he doesn’t have a wig,” Clark notes with a comic twang of jealousy. “He just has such a gorgeous natural head of hair.”
Heat — unplanned or not — is something of a theme for “The Rings of Power” Season 3, where over in the fiery volcano of Mount Doom arguably the most seismic event in Tolkien’s entire universe is taking place.
Yes, it’s the forging of the One Ring to Rule Them All by the Dark Lord Sauron himself. As showrunner J.D. Payne says, it’s a hotly anticipated moment that allows Charlie Vickers, having spent the previous two seasons in disguise as Halbrand and Annatar, to finally make his grand long-in-the-works entrance as “full metal Sauron” (with a fancy new sword, too).
Of course, such a momentous occasion — one that will shift the entire story of the series (and, you know, potentially play a part in future plotlines involving Hobbitses) wasn’t one where the filmmakers wanted to go minimal. Fellow “Rings of Power” co-showrunner Patrick McKay describes the ring-making scene they shot as “the most extraordinarily technically complicated sequence we’ve ever attempted on the show,” one that even VFX specialist Jason Smith (an Oscar nominee for the bear sequences on “The Revenant”) said was one of the most complex of his career.
And yet, perhaps offsetting some of this lava-enhanced lurch towards evil, a very different sort of heat is steaming things up elsewhere.
Payne admits that Galadriel has “been through the ringer” so far in “The Rings of Power,” so this time around they’re brightening things up for her with a splash of romance. “From the very beginning, we had a plan to bring back her long-lost husband, who she believes is dead, and this was the season to tell that love story,” he says.
“It’s just lush,” says Clark, adding that it was nice to take a break from the battlefield to spend some time in the “magical fairy realm.”
And in Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays her returning spouse Celeborn (found after a six-month casting process), she says the show has “managed to find an actual real-life elf.”
Things may be looking for Galadriel in Season 3 (aside from the whole Sauron thing, of course) but it’s about to get worse for poor Elrond. The showrunners previously stated that they planned to “break” the youthful, ambitious diplomat seen so far to set him on the path towards the stoic, battle-hardened leader as depicted in the films, and it looks like that’s happening this time.
“They’re constantly testing him — all the time he’s morally grappling with the challenges they’re giving him,” says Aramayo.
The first season of “The Rings of Power” shot during lockdown in New Zealand, arguably the closest country to Middle-earth thanks to Peter Jackson’s efforts. But it shifted to the U.K. — home to a good number of the main cast and heads of department — for the second, mostly divided between Bovingdon Airfield and Bray Studios (which Amazon later acquired and — if rumors are correct — was recently used to hold the final James Bond auditions).
For Season 3, they’ve shifted the entire operation into the newly-expanded Shepperton Studios (which wasn’t ready for Season 2), taking over nine of the 17 new soundstages and a backlot. Funnily enough, Netflix had already moved into the other eight, which it uses to house “Bridgerton” (a mere white fence divides too very different shows).
It’s a hugely impressive setup here. And it’s one, given the worlds and characters being created, that offers some truly wonderful visual moments. Witnessing a group of orcs tuck into craft services (an impressive selection of dishes with each listed on a board alongside their carbon footprint) is a sight that should never get old.
Barring some major upheaval, there won’t be any further relocating. “Season 3 and going forward, we are all in Shepperton,” says McKay. But the vast size and scope of the facility the series now calls home does mean that almost everything can be shot there.
“I think the biggest thing for this season is that we’re not going to go abroad and shoot big foreign landscapes, we’re going to do a lot more here,” says production designer Kristian Milstead, who notes that, while while some of the set builds for Season 3 might not be the biggest on the show, one is certainly the most immersive, allowing for camera shots in all directions (and thus drastically reducing the need for any extension into VFX).
For all the impressive creativity — and creative cooling methods — there is a small oliphaunt in the room.
The “Rings of Power” is widely considered to be the most expensive TV show ever produced, with a reported price tag in the region of $1 billion, way above the likes of “House of the Dragon” or “Stranger Things.”
And yet, despite the record-breaking investment, it hasn’t quite left the cultural mark on the world the team behind it — nor Jeff Bezos himself — might have hoped for. Alongside middling reviews and a backlash from some Tolkien fans, audience numbers have dwindled since its impressive launch (Season 2 had a 60% drop off from Season 1).
“I think with anyone who is shepherding a title or piece of IP with a huge global audience, you have to be your own harshest critic,” says Payne when asked about dealing with exterior noise. “The pressure we put on ourselves as fans of this material — that has been be the God we pray to.”
Given the cost and reaction, there has been questions over whether Prime Video will continue “The Rings of Power.” Amazon originally committed to a five-season, 50-episode run, but Season 4 is yet to be officially greenlit, despite rumors it’s shooting in early 2027.
“We’re busily working away in Middle-earth every day,” says McKay diplomatically when asked if he’s confident the show will get the full five-season run. “We just keep going.”
Clark, meanwhile, simply appreciates that shows as bold, elaborate and as “The Rings of Power” are actually being made.
“I just love to be on something creative where there’s a couple of thousand people employed to do it, it’s just wonderful,” she says. “That’s why I’m always so happy when we have another season because the amount of people that are a part of making it is just massive. So I just feel really lucky to be heading back into this world, but also heading back into it with this village that we’ve got.”
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