The following contains major spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1, Episode 8, "Alloyed," now streaming on Prime Video.
According to Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power star Charlie Vickers, his character didn't tell a single lie in Season 1.
It was revealed in the Season 1 finale of Rings of Power, "Alloyed," that Vickers' character Halbrand had been the Dark Lord Sauron all along. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Vickers stated that he found it "interesting because [Sauron] is this deceiver and ultimately in order to deceive he has to fully embody this form he’s taken on."
"In order to convince someone like Galadriel, he has to be completely immersed in what he’s doing, which meant for me completely immersing myself in the character of Halbrand," the actor continued. "But all the subconscious work of Sauron is there in the back. But yeah, he says a line, I think in the fifth episode: 'I’m sorry, I’m sorry for all of it. I’m sorry for your brother.' Which is true. It’s just that Galadriel doesn’t see what she needs to see. She doesn’t see the truth of that statement."
Sauron Is Evil, Not a Liar
However, Vickers didn't always know that Halbrand was Sauron. He explained that his characters' true identity only became clear to him at the beginning of Episode 3. "We filmed the first two episodes and then the show went on hiatus because of COVID," he explained, adding, "toward the end of the hiatus, the showrunners [J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay] sat me down and told me. I filmed that sequence on the raft [in Episode 2] not knowing. I filmed it as Halbrand wholeheartedly."
In a recent interview, Payne and McKay said that, now that Sauron's identity is out in the open, they are excited to let their antagonist shine moving on to Season 2. "Sauron can now just be Sauron," said McKay. The showrunner added that revealing who Sauron was later in the season was important in ensuring audiences saw his complexities and realized he was more than just a villain -- not unlike popular antiheroes such as Walter White and Tony Soprano. The newly-revealed Sauron will likely make for some action-packed moments in Season 2, which McKay promised will be "bigger and better" than Season 1, on "every level... by an order of magnitude."
Season 2 of The Rings of Power has already started filming outside of London, England. Season 1 of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available to stream in its entirety on Prime Video.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter