The Rings of Power Season 2 already looks set to be a lot darker than the show’s first, as the evil powers of Middle-earth rise to prominence. The showrunners confirmed to TheGamer that the second season moves away from Galadriel as the protagonist and focuses on Sauron, who, in his celestial Annatar form, beguiles Celebrimbor with an almost “bromance” thanks to the chemistry of Charlie Vickers and Charles Edwards.

But what does that mean for the Amazonian heroine of Season 1?

“In the first season Galadriel had such certainty, and all that’s been completely shattered,” actress Morfydd Clark tells me. “And so she’s trying to figure out who she is and who she has to make sure she is really, because she’s also been shown that she has this capacity to first of all get things wrong, but also be drawn to the dark. So she’s learning anew who she’s going to be in this dark world that’s starting to be created.

“It must be weird to have to start anew thousands of years old. It’s a lot of habits to break. It’s really fun kind of going into playing her in a totally different space.”

That darkness is represented not only by Sauron’s whisperings in Celebrimbor’s ears, but also by Adar, a fallen Elf who opens the season by murdering Sauron in a flashback, and calls himself a father to the Orcs of a newly-created Mordor. The show follows in Tolkien’s conflicted footsteps of trying to make the Orcs redeemable, human even, and in the opening episodes we see them talk of settling down, creating a home, and even an Orc family complete with newborn baby Orc swaddled in grimy rags.

“Adar definitely believes that Orcs aren’t kind of these irredeemable monsters,” explains Sam Hazeldine, who has taken over the role of Adar from Joseph Mawle this season. “He believes that they are sentient beings and that they don’t deserve to be used as cannon fodder and just treated like dirt.

“He wants them to be protected. And so he is their father and it feels duty bound to protect them and to find a place for them or create a place for them in Mordor that is a home and a safe place for them, which isn’t that much to ask really.”

The idea of redemption for Orcs is a Tolkien deep cut, something he wrestled with in notes and letters but never managed to realise on the published page during his lifetime. The actors in The Rings of Power understand implicitly that they’re basing their roles – whether those written by Tolkien or created for the show – on a wealth of canon, and they’re sure to keep their performances grounded in that work.

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“We all just read – me listened – to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings constantly,” says Clark. “Because what’s amazing about what [Tolkien] wrote is that the world it’s so rich and detailed that even if you’re having to discover who your character is within it, you know exactly the world in which you need to inhabit.

“Something I find really useful in trying to be an authentic elf was their love of the earth and of the capacity for things to be beautiful and good. That’s something that I kept with me and that felt like a good anchor. The Orcs make a big mess of the earth – lots of burning, lots of chopping down of trees. Can’t be doing that.”

Hazeldine agrees, adding some context for the character of Adar, who wasn’t written by Tolkien but fits neatly into his ideas. “There’s so much humanity – you alluded to it before – in Tolkien’s work that, even as a non-Tolkien character, it’s not such a huge leap to imagine this other character [Adar] within that world. It feels supported by his writing, and you [can] imagine this new character quite easily within that world.”

For many fans, Adar was a highlight of Season 1, and trailers suggest that the two will be interacting a lot more over the next eight episodes. It seems they might even form an uneasy truce in order to face off against the greater evil that is Sauron – an intriguing prospect. Elves and Orcs fighting together? It’s unheard of, but it doesn’t seem too far from Tolkien’s own beliefs.