[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 Episode 7, “Doomed to Die.”]
They don’t make battle scenes like this anymore. What House of the Dragon lacked in climactic fantasy action at the end of its second season, Prime Video‘s The Rings of Power just delivered in spades. The penultimate episode of Season 2 saw the epic Battle of Eregion play out to deadly consequences in a long string of action sequences that didn’t just take place in the latter half of the episode, but rather across the episode’s entire hour.
Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and the orcs’ siege of the elven city was depicted in stages throughout an entire day and night, with the dust not even close to settling after the sun rose on the horizon. Where light usually brings hope in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world, the morning rays only made the devastation more clear as new commander Elrond (Robert Aramayo) realized aid from Durin (Owain Arthur) and Disa (Sophia Nomvete) was not coming. The conclusion of this conflict will come in next week’s Season 2 finale (debuting October 3).
Here, Aramayo, Benjamin Walker (High King Gil-galad), director Charlotte Brändström, and cinematographer Alex Disenhof take TV Insider behind the scenes of the massive production. Trust me when I say massive — I was on set of the Battle of Eregion last year and witnessed the effort it took to bring a battle scene of such epic proportions to life.
The Rings of Power‘s Battle of Eregion Took 6 Weeks to Film
A stunt performed during the filming of the Battle of Eregion (Ross Ferguson / Prime Video)
Planning an episode like this takes much longer than actually filming it. Making a list of every shot you need with details of how they will be filmed is a meticulous and important part of the process, as are the months of rehearsals with the cast, stunt team, and crew leading up to filming. And then there’s the planning that comes the day before each shoot, which is its own beast before you factor in design elements that further complicate the process. In the end, Brändström and Disenhof tell TV Insider it took six weeks to film Episode 7, many of those days being night shoots.
“It was months and months of planning, ” Disenhof says, and then “it was well over a year before we shot the sequence.”
Adar and the orcs damned the river that shielded Eregion from outside forces by causing a rockslide on the nearby mountain. This turned the ground around the city walls into mud that never dried up. Brändström says that filming in mud was the biggest challenge of the entire episode “because it was like shooting in snow or in water.”
RelatedWhat [Spoiler’s] Shocking Death in ‘The Rings of Power’ Means for Númenor
“It takes forever to move around and everything needs to be planned ahead and you can’t just take a piece of equipment and move it on the other side because you’re walking through deep mud and everything sinks,” she explains. “You need to prepare everything in advance, so we need to decide the day before what shots we’re going to do the next morning so they can actually lay out boards on the ground.”
Disenhof notes that “there are fires everywhere” at the same time (controlled ones for the scenes like the one pictured above), which adds another time-consuming element to the production. The blazes serve the story well, but there is a boatload of safety precautions that must be taken for those live special effects. Adding on to the production time is the fact that the monitors where the director and more staff watch the scenes being filmed aren’t as close to the action as you may think. For this episode in particular (which was filmed in Buttersteep Forest in Ascot, England), the monitors were set up in a small trailer a bit of a walk away from the field.
“Even for me to go out and speak to the actors, I couldn’t communicate [in-person] because it would take me 10 minutes to walk over to them in the mud,” Brändström shares. Walkie-talkies helped bridge the gap.
Best-laid plans often have to make way for improvisation on the day of filming. That’s where some of the “magic” can really happen, Brändström says. She notes one shot in the episode where Elrond falls forward and a “huge splash” of water comes up as an explosion goes off in the background simultaneously. The splash was all luck.
“That was just incredible coincidence,” she shares. “It’s a great shot. And [Aramayo] did [the fall] and it looked real.”
Another real element was the mouse that Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) watches closely to figure out Sauron’s (Charlie Vickers) magical illusion blinding him to the war outside his workshop. The real mouse’s name was Peachy. Brändström shared this fact at a Rings of Power screening and Q&A event on September 24 in NYC that I attended.
Robert Aramayo Was Terrified of Horses Before Filming Season 2
Ross Ferguson / Prime Video
Horses are also a major part of the production. Watching the emotional scene where an orc kills Elrond’s horse, you’d think the actor was always comfortable with the creatures. But Aramayo tells TV Insider that he had a deep fear of the animals because of a prior experience unconnected to the show.
“When I started working on the second season, I was absolutely terrified of horses because I’d had this really bad experience with this horse. It almost threw me off,” Aramayo says with a laugh. “So they just gave me all this training with horses. I got to a point where I could have done a lot of the earlier stuff in the season with the horses, but they won’t let you because of insurance. And they didn’t really trust me enough to be able to do it. But then right at the end when we were shooting all the horse stuff in the battle, Vic [Armstrong, stunt coordinator and 2nd unit director] let me do some of it.”
“There was this one shot where it was a canter in through the trees. Vic came up to me beforehand and was just like, ‘When you ride past that tree, make sure you don’t go too close to it, otherwise it’ll take your head off.’ He was like, ‘Good luck!’” Aramayo says, making him and Walker (who was with him in this interview) crack up.
If you don’t know Armstrong by name, you definitely know his work. He was Harrison Ford’s stunt double in the Indiana Jones movies and is considered the industry’s most prolific stuntman (he actually holds a Guinness World Record for stunts). Imagine Indiana Jones telling you not to get your head whacked right before you’re about to conquer a personal fear. It’s no wonder Aramayo shares this story when asked about his most memorable moments from filming the episode.
“[Armstrong] was almost very cavalier,” Walker teases. “He was like, ‘So, uh, you’re going to catch on fire if you don’t turn left.’”
Aramayo adds that he was “very, very proud” of his work with the horses in the end.
Elrond and Galadriel Kiss Explained
Prime Video
One of the episode’s most shocking moments wasn’t violence, but a kiss shared between Elrond and Galadriel (Morfydd Clark). Galadriel was Adar’s prisoner and used as bait to get the elves to hand over her ring of power, Nenya. Elrond refused even when Galadriel’s life was threatened, but she understood completely. He asked to say his goodbye to his longtime friend and then shocked her and those watching when he kissed her. It was all a distraction staged so he could slip a pin into her hand with which she could free herself from her handcuffs.
Related‘The Rings of Power’ Creators Explain That Orc Family & Why It’s Important for Season 2
Lord of the Rings fans know that Elrond goes on to marry Galadriel’s daughter, Celebrian, in the books. Elrond and Galadriel are also distant cousins. The Episode 7 kiss, with its framing and emotional swell of a score, may make you think that this kiss was romantic. Aramayo says it is quite emotional, but not in a romantic sense.
“That was improved on the day, wasn’t it?” Walker jokes (it wasn’t, but Aramayo laughs at the tease).
“It starts off as purely strategic, but it’s also emotional and heightened because it’s a goodbye as well,” Aramayo explains. “It’s a potential goodbye forever, or for now — until the Halls of Mandos. So it is a really emotional moment, but the impetus for it is a really practical and diversionary tactic.”
“Galadriel is his hero,” he continues. “There’s a blood relation — and actually, Elrond’s related to almost everyone. But as I said, she’s his hero. She’s taught him so much. It’s more than best friends. It feels like family members. And so it’s the emotion of saying goodbye to a family member who you think might die soon.”
The Rings of Power‘s Troll Fight Scene Explained
Robert Aramayo, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Benjamin Walker film The Rings of Power‘s Battle of Eregion (Ben Rothstein / Prime Video)
Elrond, Gil-galad, and Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) team up to take down the massive hill troll, Damrod, recruited by Adar to help take down Sauron in this battle. Walker voiced the 16-foot creature himself, but he didn’t know he would be doing that when filming the scene where they kill it.
Filming that sequence was done in “probably the most cumbersome avenue we could have taken,” Walker says, because on the day they were acting against a prosthetic of Damrod’s foot and “acting against the C-Stand [camera mount] with a tennis ball on it” to give them an eyeline for the character’s height.
“We don’t fully have the image realized,” Walker adds. “We’re putting a lot of trust in the CG artists. We’ve finished filming, at which point I then get asked to voice it. Then we’re reverse engineering narrative for the creature but in a truncated amount of time on screen. It was kind of completely backwards, but it’s a testament to our technicians and artists. They really made it come together.
“They really were interested in the details and the nuances of the voice recordings, whether or not [Damrod] had a sense of humor, what can we glean about his past from how he carries himself and breathes,” Walker goes on. “It was a lot of fun, actually. And not having known all of that [when filming the death scene], it worked to our advantage that we were just trying to survive in the mud against this thing we didn’t fully understand and that having fought it, I could then glean what it would be like to be it. It worked out, but it was certainly ass-backwards.”
Next week’s finale will show the final moments of the Siege of Eregion and its fallout, as well as the fated reunion between Galadriel and Sauron teased in the trailers.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Season 2 Finale, Thursday, October 3, Prime Video
More Headlines:
‘High Potential’: What Happened to Morgan’s Ex Roman?‘Found’ Season 2: Shanola Hampton & Mark-Paul Gosselaar Tease Gabi and Sir Without Chains (VIDEO)Inside ’The Rings of Power’s Epic Battle of Eregion & That Shocking Kiss Explained‘The View’ Fans Fume as ABC News Breaks Away for Speech by NYC Mayor Eric Adams‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 Teaser Unveiled & Everything to Know So Far
