We've seen a trailer (though a second is long overdue) and quite a few stills and posters for Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power at this stage, but one Middle Earth race that's been completely absent from all promotional material up until now is the Orcs.
Now, IGN has shared a new series of images spotlighting the "ruined and terrible" creatures who align themselves with the dark powers.
As you can see, these Orcs look quite a bit different to the hulking Uruk-Hai of Peter Jackson's trilogy. As executive producer Lindsey Weber explains, these Second Age Orcs are scattered and leaderless after the fall of Morgoth (Sauron's predecessor) at the end of the First Age, and are really more akin to the Goblin described in The Hobbit.
“We spent a lot of time talking about what it would mean to be an Orc in the Second Age,” said Weber. “It felt appropriate that their look would be different, part of a wilder, more raw, Second Age, Middle-earth, closer to where the First Age ends. As we meet them, they're not yet organized into armies, they're a little more scattered and they've been scavenging. So it's just a different time in their total story.”
Amazon Studios’ forthcoming series brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness.
Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is set to premiere on Friday, September 2.