Rings of Power star Charlie Vickers on Sauron and why he’d rather win an AFL flag than an Oscar
Despite his stellar acting career, Rings of Power star Charlie Vickers reveals a dream life experience that would trump winning an Oscar.
TV
Don't miss out on the headlines from TV. Followed categories will be added to My News.
He might have spent most of his career overseas and become an integral part of what could be the most expensive TV show ever made, but Aussie actor Charlie Vickers has never forgotten where he came from.
The Melbourne-born, Geelong raised star plays the villainous Sauron in the big-budget Lord of the Rings spin-off, Rings of Power, which filmed its first season in New Zealand and its second season in the UK.
The former school captain of the prestigious Geelong Grammar, where he won the top drama prize, relocated to London nearly a decade ago to study at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and is still based there with his wife Georgie Oulton and their young son.
But he still feels the pull of home, the beaches of the Surf Coast where he grew up, the countryside, family and friends … and football. The Geelong-mad Vickers was a pretty handy player himself at school – “I was good but I never quite had the recklessness and carelessness and I think I was a bit too scared of getting my head knocked off” – and literally has Aussie rules in his blood. His cousin Ed Vickers-Willis played 21 games for North Melbourne – and wherever he is in the world, he still finds a way to watch his team play.
“I wake up at all hours to watch the Cats and that’s something that will never change,” he says in Sydney while pondering the first week of the AFL finals. “We are in OK form but I am a bit worried about Port Adelaide first up. I think I would have rathered finish fourth and play Sydney in Sydney because Port are in such good form. But we’ll see – you never know. I just hope it’s not a straight sets exit.”
Indeed, so obsessed is Vickers that given the choice between winning an Oscar and kicking the winning goal for Geelong after the siren in a Grand Final, he doesn’t even hesitate.
“It would have to be at the Grand Final after the siren,” he says with a laugh. “I mean an Oscar would be cool … but definitely after the siren. 100 per cent.”
After returning to Australia in 2021 between his Rings of Power commitments to film the acclaimed TV adaptation of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Vickers says he’s keen to stay connected to the local industry.
“I love Australian stories and the film and TV that is made here is some of the best in the world,” he says. “The land and the landscape plays a part in so many stories and that was a big part of Lost Flowers and it’s something I want to keep doing more and more of.”
Sitting in a hotel room with Sydney Harbour glittering behind him, Vickers is feeling relaxed and relieved at the end of a long global press tour for the second season of Rings of Power. He went in to the first season as an unknown quantity with his character Halbrand invented for the show rather than taken from the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, leading to wild fan speculation about who he really was.
Vickers didn’t even find out that Halbrand was one of the many guises of the shapeshifting Dark Lord Sauron (although his audition piece as Satan in Paradise Lost should have been a red flag) until he was filming the third episode, but then had to keep quiet about it until the big reveal in the season finale.
“The way the press tour started was that people interviewing you at the very beginning were like ‘we think Sauron is in this show – maybe he is around … you’re an original character, it could be you’,” Vickers recalls with a laugh. “And then by the end of it they were just like ‘you’re Sauron aren’t you? I know you’re Sauron’. So I had to get better at deflecting the questions. I would say something along the line of ‘oh yes, that’s an interesting theory’.”
Now the secret is out in the open, Vickers has been front and centre to promote the second season but he says that portraying one of the great literary villains came with a weight of privilege rather than pressure.
“I am incredibly lucky to have this role and feel like I am a custodian of this role for this role in Tolkien’s universe,” he says. “It’s funny, I remember watching an interview with Meryl Streep years ago and she said that when you’re on a set you forget about all the other stuff. I think I was a drama school and I thought ‘there’s no way you could forget’.
“But when you’re opposite another actor, you kind forget the repercussions of everything you’re doing and the pressure has been a nice thing in a way.”
It also helped that he and the Rings of Power writers were largely free to craft the role to suit the show. Details about Sauron in the source material are sketchy and in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy, he’s seen either as a shadowy, unspeaking figure or a giant, flaming eye.
And after having his Halbrand cover blown by the elf warrior Galadriel at the end of last season, Sauron returns in a different physical form as he goes about the cunning and secret business of crafting the rings that he will use to enslave Middle-earth. For much of the second season, he seduces, manipulates and deceives his foes by appearing as an angelic looking elf called Annatar – meaning that Vickers had to also reinvent his performance.
“For me it was about finding the psychological through line that connected both of them,” he says. “Ultimately they are the same character and the differences were a different way of moving, a different way of talking, which we developed over a long process.
“And obviously he looks different. But that all came from what Tolkien wrote about Annatar and Sauron. We were really inspired by the way that Tolkien described him, which was quite scarce. He just says that he appeared in a fine form, so we had a real canvas that was kind of blank we could draw on, which was really nice.”
Working with the same dialect coach who had worked on the Hobbit trilogy, Vickers also traded the rough northern England accent he’d adopted for Halbrand for some more modulated tones that would reflect Annatar’s regal appearance and bearing. Apparently his natural accent just wouldn’t cut it.
“I might have pitched it, for Sauron to be a good old Aussie battler,” laughs Vickers. “It’s funny, because I went to drama school in England, I couldn’t act in an Australian accent because I was so used to doing an English accent. They asked me how to do an Australian accent in a play and I didn’t know how.”
Vickers’ costume upgrade came at a cost however: not only did he have learn how to negotiate stairs in his long, flowing robes, he also had to endure three hours every day in hair and make-up, including prosthetic ears that took 45 minutes each to apply.
“It’s a nice process – but it also takes an hour to get it off at the end of the day so you have to commit a bit more time. But we became really close friends with our prosthetic artists so it was actually a really nice way to start the day.”
As Vickers’ star continues to rise – Rings of Power is expected to run for five seasons and Lord of the Rings fans already know that Sauron survives in some form – the actor is determined to stay grounded by remembering his experience on one his very first acting jobs. Five years ago he appeared alongside local legends Sam Neill and Bryan Brown in the Australian rom-com Palm Beach and was feeling a little overwhelmed his first day on set.
“I remember Sam, the first thing he did was come up and say hello and he knew my name and called me by my first name the whole day,” Vickers says. “And it makes a difference. It’s little things like that and I think that being people before being actors is something that I have tried to take in everything that I do.”
The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is streaming on Prime Video.
‘Go f**k yourselves’: Ellen hits back at public
Ellen DeGeneres is returning to TV after a lengthy hiatus with a new special, and she isn’t holding back on being ousted from Hollywood.
What term means any creature without a backbone?
The Chase Australia’s official Shark, Brydon Coverdale, has created a new daily quiz challenge. Test yourself.