Sam Hazeldine is an actor with orcish commitment to his craft. Having inherited the mantle of Adar from Joseph Mawle, the 52-year-old Englishman has stepped into the role of the layered antagonist in Amazon’s colossal fantasy prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power . In its much-anticipated second season, Hazeldine not only fans the flames of Adar’s zealous resolve, but also deepens his story with a concoction of paternal instincts and ruthless determination — a feat that proves once more that the lines between good and evil are seldom clear-cut in Middle Earth.
When I ask him how he sees Adar, Sam is quick to deflect any rudimentary labels. “I don’t see him as a villain at all, really,” he says. “He’s just trying to make life happen, to give the Uruk a life, really, which he has succeeded in doing at the end of the first season by creating Mordor, and they can live there, hopefully — we’ll see.
” It’s the “hopefully” that stands out. There’s a sense of unfinished business, of a job half done. In Tolkien’s world Adar occupies a fascinating grey space.
“For Adar, it’s about a singleness of purpose,” Sam explains. “He has to make absolutely sure that he fulfils his promise to them, really, of protecting them and saving them either from the darkness of Sauron or from the elves who apparently want to wipe out the race of the Uruk once and for all.” Sam Hazeldine as Adar in a still from ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2| P.