The Lord of the Rings: first images of Orcs from the series The Rings of Power

Good news, they are not in CGI (unlike part of the Orcs of The Hobbit), but made up (almost) like in The Fellowship of the Ring. With some new things all the same. Here are the details.

Highlights of the saga created by J.R.R. Tolkien, the Orcs are back in the Amazon Prime series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The series, set during the Second Age, gives these creatures a new physical appearance. They seem more frail but also more realistic than the first inhabitants of Mordor imagined by Peter Jackson and his teams for The Fellowship of the Ring. Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series, explains in an interview for IGN “There's been a lot of discussion about what it's like to be an Orc in the Second Age. It seemed fitting that they looked different, within a rawer, wilder Second Age Middle-earth, near the end of the First Age. When we discover them, they are not yet organized into armies, they are more scattered and they try to survive. It really is a different time in their overall history.”

The look of an Orc from The Lord of the Rings was inspired by… Harvey Weinstein

If digital technologies had been used a lot in the second trilogy, The Hobbit, no CGI in seen here. The Orcs were made “in real life”. To give them this look even more real than life, Jamie Wilson, chief prosthetist on the series, explains that he was inspired by the look of Orcs from the first Peter Jackson film, but adding elements that were uncommon at the turn of the 2000s: “Times have changed a lot. Twenty years ago, latex foam was used, which is a kind of porous rubber, a spongy material with a smooth or optional surface. It was a good time. But it was just at the end of filming The Lord of the Rings when we made our very first silicone version of Gimli. After that he was able to wear silicone, but now it's the norm. So the ears, the noses, their body parts are all encapsulated silicone, which is basically two layers of silicone with a removable piece of silicone in the middle, so that when it's applied to the face of an actor, they can move and it works. Then you gently paint over it, much like makeup on a human rather than spreading paint over the prosthesis like we did before. »

The series will be available on Prime Video on September 2, 2022. It is set 7 thousand years before the events of the original saga and the Hobbit, i.e. during the Second Age. It will of course tell the creation of the Rings of power, but also the rise of Sauron as well as other condensed events for the series.

The trailer right here:

The Lord of the Rings: Beautiful new photos for the Rings of Power