Summary
- Isildur's journey in The Rings of Power Season 2 involves intense fighting and personal growth.
- Actor Maxim Baldry delved deep into research to understand and develop Isildur's character from his origins to a warrior.
- Isildur's rebelliousness and darkness may come from a place of longing to be loved, adding depth to his portrayal in the series.
Isildur’s entry into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Rings of Power Season 2 starts with a bang. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Annatar schemes, Celebrimbor forges, Galadriel recovers, and the Dwarves worry, Isil💫dur lofts his swওord high and strikes hard.
Stranded in Middle-earth an💎d abandoned by his people, Isildur’s first actio🐼n this season is to fight his way out of the barren landscape of Mordor and its surrounding area. Naturally, he begins by fighting a young Shelob in a cramped cave of underground spiders.
“The first thing he has to fight is an Orc,” Isildur actor Maxim Baldry explains. “But Orcs, the stunt guys in the prosthetics, have zero peripheral vision. So it's actually quite dangerous because they're dressed in these really big costumes, they've got prosthetics on, and they're quite physical. It's kind of dangerous.
“Obviously, all the safety precautions are taken into consideration, but it was a little bit more robust and physical [than fighting computer-generated creatures]. With people, you have to be a lot more quick and coordinated because you're a lot closer and you can do more. So I kind of like the spider cave, to be honest. I like being a bit more rough and tumble with it all.”
However, Isildur isn’t just the fighter we know from the Last Alliance. He’s a character most fans will already have preconceptions of from the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books or from watching the films &ndashꦇ; and he doesn’t give the best impression when he takes the One Ring for himself and dooms Middle-earth to centuries more of darkness.
"He's longing to be loved," - Maxim Baldry on Isildur.
When I asked Baldry about challenging fans’ preconceptions about the character, he admitted that he, too, had his own idea of who Isildur was before taking on the role, and♚ had to work hard to understand exactly what made him🔜 tick in the Second Age.
“I had to really delve deep into the research and come up with my own interpretation of [Isildur],” Baldry says. “And in a wa﷽y, we had to reverse engineer Isildur because we know where he ends up, but where does he start? Which is also a blessing in a way, because we get to really build him up from the🐓 ground.
“So Season 1 is a story about him eager to leave and explore the world. And Season 2 is one of him having to grow up and then desperately want to go home. It's a story of personal growth for him and he hardens, all of the experiences in Season 2 harden him. And he becomes a man and becomes more of a warrior that we kind of expect him to be.”
While we know a lot about what characters do in the Second Age, Tolkien’s style in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Silmarillion – and especially about this era in comparison to his writing about the First Age – often lacks detail and skips over characterisation. Baldry therefore used this text as the basis of his character, but also read more widely and employed learnings from philosophers to ജget to the bottom of Isildur’s character development and rebellious streak.
“Tolkien was at the forefront of my research for [Isildur],” he explains. “But again, he doesn't really give us a lot. He gives us signposts of things that he does. Obviously, I read the Silmarillion, I read the trilogy, and that was my starting point. But then I also wanted to know a bit more about Isildur's character and I looked a lot into Camus and the rebel. There was a quote by Camus, rebelliousness is a strange form of love, [sic] and I just liked how [Isildur’s] darkness might actually be a positive thing in a way for him. He's longing to be loved. And I think instead of it being such a dark and negative thing, what he eventually does, I think it might come from a good place.”
Every Tolkien fan understands the pull of the Ring, even if they don’t forgive characters like Isildur and Borimir for their reactions to its dark magic. The artefact is temptation incarnate, Tolkien’s apple in th𝓰e perfectly-tended garden of Eden that is Middle-earth. However, is there room for actors’ own interpretations of iconic characters in adaptations of the seminal fantasy work?
“Everyone has their own interpretation of the trilogy,” Baldry says. “But I think what's important is to not forget that we're playing human characters who have interactions with one another. And I'm playing a human and they're inherently fallible as beings, so that's a fascinating thing to play.
“What are our motivations? What drives us? What's our environment? Where do we come from and how does that impact us? And I think all of those things are what are brewing at the minute and it just ramps up season upon season. And I'm very excited to continue playing this character.”
