The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is offering “an origin story for Sauron,” bringing literature and cinema’s top villain to TV, but it is not the first adaptation to show Sauron in live-action (via The Hollywood Reporter). The Lord of the Rings movies popularized Sauron as a giant, flaming eye, making a lot of people think he never had a physical body. Rings of Power is bringing Sauron back into the public consciousness, and definitely with a body, which he occasionally had in the books. As such, it’s a good time to look back on exactly who has played Sauron.

Pioneer of the high fantasy genre, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Sauron as a terrifying tyrant in The Lord of the Rings, which Jackson adapted for his movies. But this tyrant had a blackened hand with four fingers and a whole body at the end of it, used cruelly to torture Gollum. This makes Jackson’s fiery eye a very creative interpretation of the text indeed. The evil Sauron was, however, a spirit being and a shapeshifter over the ages. This makes his portrayal in live-action richly varied, with four actors so far having had the honor of playing him.

Sala Baker

The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring

Sala Baker played Sauron in the flashback prologue to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, fully embodied before he was obliterated by the Last Alliance, leaving him to slowly reform as the giant eye of Peter Jackson renown. Fully outfitted from head to toe in Sauron’s full body armor, Baker nonetheless oozed personality. The epitome of the evil villain, Sauron was a defining part of this famous Hollywood movie opening. Without a single line of dialogue, Baker was haughty, maniacal, and dramatic as he held up his hand, One Ring perched triumphantly on his index finger.

Baker topped off the prologue to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by batting soldiers out of his path with a giant mace like so many dandelions.

Sauron could have been just as easily admiring his new jewelry as carrying out some kind of heinous sorcery, which speaks to the timelessness of the scene. Baker’s brief performance could have seemed “comic book” in a lesser movie, but Baker was knowingly settling into a fantasy world that was built for the classic villain and gave due importance to his grave threat. It was Tolkien, after all, who laid the groundwork for many comic book villains to come. Minor but resonant, this role was owned by Baker, although his face was unseen and he was unrecognizable.

Baker said “this thing happened to my body” and then described thinking “I am the Lord of the Rings” (via Diary of the Mouth). Perhaps there was indeed some kind of sorcery going on. Regardless, Wētā Workshop’s painstaking Sauron costume design was starkly original and rendered him genuinely scary. Just humanoid enough to look like a real threat and just animal enough to be really quite upsetting, Sauron’s helmet was based on a horse’s skull. Sauron was canonically “an image of malice and hatred made visible” in this body, according to The Silmarillion, leaving Wētā some scope for creativity.

Benedict Cumberbatch

The Hobbit 1, 2, & 3

The inimitable Benedict Cumberbatch got in a motion capture suit to portray the disembodied Necromancer Sauron of The Hobbit movies, voicing him to perfection. Cumberbatch pretty much carried villainy in The Hobbit, also voicing Smaug. Watching behind-the-scenes videos of Benedict Cumberbatch doing voice acting in The Hobbit extended edition DVDs is fairly unbelievable. Even without any of New Line Cinema’s impressive production layered over the top, Cumberbatch is utterly terrifying.

Cumberbatch’s Necromancer Sauron was a step more embodied than Lord of the Rings’ Eye of Sauron, but no less ominous. Cumberbatch played another disconcerting sociopath of a considerably lesser degree in BBC drama Sherlock. In the titular role as the most famous fictional detective in Britain and possibly the world, Cumberbatch played Sherlock Holmes. Cumberbatch’s roles as Sauron, Sherlock Holmes, and Shere Khan in Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle say it all, really – don’t mess with Benedict Cumberbatch.

As far as The Lord of the Rings timeline goes, this version of Sauron comes after Baker’s Sauron was destroyed but before the giant eye Sauron had managed to set himself atop Barad-dûr in The Lord of the Rings movies. The Necromancer was no more described in Tolkien’s The Hobbit book than the giant eye Sauron was in The Lord of the Rings book, but Cumberbatch’s fiery spirit put across a worthy opponent for the White Council in the movies. The Necromancer vs. Galadriel face-off in The Hobbit was an invention of Jackson’s that helped him tie The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings.

Charlie Vickers

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Seasons 1 & 2

By sheer force of screen time alone, Charlie Vickers may be the most memorable Sauron. Representing the elusive fiend in Amazon Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Vickers’ spot as top Sauron would be hotly contested by many Lord of the Rings fans. Sauron’s identity was teased with mystery box writing until The Rings of Power season 1 ending revealed that leading original character Halbrand had been Sauron all along. Controversially, Halbrand was an invention of the show, but Rings of Power did correctly position Sauron as embodied at this point in the Second Age.