Ahead of Rings of Power season 2 airing on Amazon, we caught up with the cast at San Diego Comic Con to talk all things Tolkien, their own nerdy habits and see what they could reveal about the upcoming season. 

A big change occurring in season 2 is the recasting of the character Adar. Joseph Mawle has departed the role, with Sam Hazeldine taking over. Hazeldine has a lot of gratitude for the opportunity to be in Rings of Power – “It’s been such a pleasure stepping into this franchise”.  He spoke highly of Mawle’s performance and said that it enabled him to continue the character easily. The game-plan for the recast was to make the transition as smooth as possible so that audiences didn’t feel as if they were being introduced to a new character which Hazeldine believes they achieved. He told us that while him and Mawle are different people, Adar is recognisably the same character, calling the transition “seamless”. 

And what of Adar this season? Hazeldine revealed that there’s a bit of a switch up as  all the characters including his own are dealing with the “existential crisis of Sauron being back”. The way Adar handles this is to try to forge relationships with the others. However, Hazeldine did tease that Adar’s attempts in this had varying degrees of success. 

While he is clearly happy to be playing Adar, we spoke about any other species he’d be interested in playing on the show. He immediately chose a hill troll due to the power but also considered being a Harfoot because of the amount of travel they do. 

Away from the show, Hazeldine revealed that his passion is music. He loves listening to songs and getting an insight into who the influences so that he can start digging into it and fall down a music rabbit hole, admitting that “it always goes back to the blues”. Hazeldine has picked the right show for his love of music as Rings of Power has already brought out two albums to accompany the series with certain actors lending their voices the soundtracks. Maybe if we’re fortunate, Hazeldine could feature on a future album?