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What went into creating Sauron and Galadriel’s sword fight?
The duel is the pair’s first encounter in season two, after their history in season one. In a May 2025 interview with TheWrap, Brändström said she studied sword fights in other films, including The Duelists and Zorro movies, as inspiration for the choreography.
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The setting was purpose-built for the action. Brändström said the set “didn’t exist before”: she and the production designer discussed what the scene required, then planned the location with uneven ground and wire work in mind. Dialogue was assigned to particular beats in the fight, so the conversation and movement could work together rather than compete.
Brändström described the choreography as dance-like and said she needed to learn the fight by heart to understand each move and where she needed to be. That preparation mattered to the scene’s performance as well as its staging.
What conversations were you having about how it should look?
Brändström’s stated priority was the actors’ relationship in the moment, not spectacle. “It’s about performance and building the tension between them,” she told TheWrap in its season-two finale interview.
She put the emphasis on their expressions and on Sauron’s ability to unsettle his opponent: “It wasn’t about doing cool shots, it was really about both their characters and how they’ll look at each other and how he constantly puts her out of balance.” The production took a long time to shoot in part because the transformations required makeup changes.
Why does Sauron become Halbrand?
Brändström explained the change as a tactic rooted in what Sauron knows about Galadriel. In an interview with Nerdist, she said Sauron begins changing shape when he realizes he may not win, and becomes Halbrand because he knows Galadriel has feelings for him.
Brändström described Galadriel as having been in love with and attracted to Halbrand, and said seeing that form destabilizes her because Sauron understands those feelings. She also said she thought Sauron would have liked Galadriel as his queen. These are the director’s interpretations of the characters’ dynamic, not claims about Tolkien’s original texts.
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How were the transformations filmed?
Brändström said the performers’ shifts between forms were created in camera with makeup coordination. “All the little tricks and everything when he shifts shapes and becomes a different character, that was all done in camera. There was no CGI, no special effects,” she told TheWrap. She distinguished these practical transformation moments from the series’ broader use of CGI to enhance backgrounds and some magic.
Why does the duel pause instead of running continuously?
For Brändström, pauses let the audience stay engaged with the people inside the action. “The sword fight has a lot of stop-and-go moments, and I think it’s really important in action to have a stop-and-go,” she told Nerdist. In her approach to character-led battle scenes, those breaks give the characters time to look at one another and let the story play through the fight.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How does the duel connect to the rest of the finale?
The October 2024 finale interview with TheWrap places the duel within an episode that also includes Eregion’s fall, Sauron obtaining the nine rings for Men, and the deaths of Celebrimbor and Adar. The confrontation concentrates the season’s collision between Sauron and Galadriel into a personal contest: its turns in the action expose how he uses both force and knowledge of her feelings.
Brändström also confirmed that some visual echoes of Peter Jackson’s films were intentional. Asked about the setting’s resemblance to Amon Hen and the Narsil moment, she called them purposeful homages while saying she was telling the story in her own way. Those wider visual callbacks are separate from the sword-fight references she named: The Duelists and Zorro movies.
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