The second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has brought on a significant change with the recasting of Adar, a major character and villain in the first season. According to Screenrant, we last saw Adar in the season one finale, where he turned the Southlands into Mordor alongside his army of orcs.

According to Screenrant, during the 2024 San Diego Comic-Con, Sam Hazeldine (The War Below) stepped into the role of Adar, previously portrayed by Joseph Mawle (The Hallow). In a previous post by mxdwn, Joseph Mawle hast stated that he purposely made a decision of not reusing for the series second season. In a recent interview with the news outlet, Hazeldine opened up about the experience of taking over such a prominent character and how easily series showrunners J.D. Payne (Escape) and Patrick McKay (Uprising) will make the transition between the actor and the importance of his character in the upcoming season.

Hazeldine said while speaking with Screenrant, “Well, I had a lot of conversations with [showrunners] J.D. [Payne] and Patrick [McKay] before we started about how we wanted to approach that. And luckily, I really enjoyed what Joseph [Mawle] did in the first season, and Adar was probably my favorite character. [To his co-stars] No offense [laughs]. So it’s actually a pleasure to kind of take the mantle and carry on from there. We don’t look alike, but it’s very clearly the same character, so I don’t think it was a… it’s not a big problem for an audience. And yes, we wanted to make it kind of as relatively seamless as possible, and… yeah, Adar has a lot to do in this season, so it was kind of straight out of the blocks and into it.”

The second season is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on August 29 with a three-episode debut. While waiting for season two to arrive, the entire first season of The Rings of Power is available to stream on Prime Video.