The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power reveals first-look photos and new details such as no sex scenes

Vanity Fair

There will be no Game of Thrones-style violence or sex on Amazon's Lord of the Rings series, a new Vanity Fair article reveals. In honoring J.R.R. Tolkien's vision, showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne say they intended “to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary—and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated—but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.” Their series will juggle 22 stars and multiple story lines, from deep within the dwarf mines of the Misty Mountains to the high politics of the elven kingdom of Lindon and the humans’ powerful, Atlantis-like island, Númenor. All this will center, eventually, around the incident that gives the trilogy its name. “The forging of the rings,” says McKay. “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.” The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?” The producers also anticipated there would be backlash to having a multiracial cast. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” said executive producer Lindsey Weber. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”