When Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premiered last year, audiences were taken on a fantastical adventure to Middle-Earth, where everything from the performances, to the sets, to the gorgeous and intricate costumes immersed viewers in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The craftsmanship and hard work really shows, with Rings of Power costume designer Kate Hawley recently earning an Emmy nomination for her work in the “Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-fi Costumes” category. Hawley will also lead a masterclass at San Diego Comic-Con titled: “From Concept to Reality: How Costume Design Helped Shape the Second Age of Middle-Earth,” which will take place on Saturday, July 22, from 4:30-5:30 PT in Room 10. In this one-on-one interview with Collider’s Arezou Amin, Hawley sat down to talk about her design process and deep-dive into what made some of the series’ most iconic costumes really stand out.

COLLIDER: Kate, you have worked on some very notable, very large-scale projects before, but what was it like getting this call to take on something as massive and sprawling as Middle-earth?

KATE HAWLEY: First of all, the first response is excitement just to be in the world again. All of us who love [J.R.R.] Tolkien, we just jump at the chance. Then I think, as with every project, reality hits them [laughs], the reality of trying to get these things done. There’s always excitement, especially before everyone goes, “And here’s the budget, and here’s the timeline,” and all of that. So I’d say every project, it’s like meeting someone for the first time, and you give them all the perfections on date night until the reality hits.

But yeah, because we always live in this world and we’re always excited about how, you know, I read the books and all of those things. So, you immediately go there. But with all these things, it’s a collaboration, and that can lead it to exciting different areas or things that are different, but it’s all part of the collaboration of a process like this, every project.

Image via Pime Video 

Was there pressure to kind of draw on the influences and aesthetics of existing on-screen depictions of The Lord of the Rings?

HAWLEY: I think always. You know, I grew up in New Zealand. You can’t grow up in New Zealand without being aware of the trilogy or how beautiful and how, for most people, myself included, seeing it was kind of pretty much exactly how you imagine the books. And we’re talking about The Lord of the Rings had huge meat in it; the films were based pretty much on that. But this project was different in that we’re in a different age and time. I was asked to produce a slightly different flavor. In some ways, the fact that I’ve been involved in that world to a certain extent wasn’t always in my favor because they wanted a different look on it, and everyone has a different interpretation.

If you look at things like Shakespeare and how many productions we’ve seen of Hamlet or all those things, everything’s through the viewer of the director or the showrunner. So my job is always to sort of honor that. But you can’t ignore it because some of those, what they did in the trilogy, was so amazing. It was so true to the work and the poetry. So I think it’s about going back to Tolkien and the source, and realizing that his words are the poetry. We didn’t have his words so much in this project, but I felt in my crew that the poetry was something that we needed to have and try and achieve visually as much as we could. So, there’s common themes all the time with his work.

Before we dive into specifics, because we have some specifics to talk about, I noticed you had done some work with the Royal New Zealand Ballet before. It kind of made me wonder about that crossover in design because an action-heavy show like this, and something like ballet, are both so dynamic. So, I wondered if you could speak to that Venn diagram.

HAWLEY: It’s a great question, actually. I hadn’t really done ballet before, especially with the more sort of classical thing. You go, “Oh, you know, it’s just like any other discipline.” It’s getting to know your cast and your actors. You have an idea of a character and actor, and then you’ve got to work with your cast member and learn the disciplines. There’s detail whether you’re doing film or theater. There’s disciplines that can cross over and inspire. I love it sometimes when film becomes more theatrical, when theater becomes more cinematic. So there’s interesting crossovers. I think sometimes we tend to think, “Oh, everything always has to be real in film,” because it’s film, and the medium is so much like that. But I don’t know, there’s lots of different things that can inspire. I think the more interest you have in things like art and all of those things, the more it inspires.

But with the ballet, it’s not unlike doing the stunts. Suddenly, with the ballet, you might have one character, like in this case of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Hansel and Gretel, but six or seven dancers could take that role. Then the repeats that are needed for the physicality and what it would do to the costume, not just sweat and ballet shoes that they go through. I was fascinated, it’s like 12 Dancing Princesses, how many ballet shoes they went through. All of that has an impact on your budget and your workroom and how you achieve those things. So you take the same disciplines, different resources all the time, different money, but I always believe in whatever your project and scale, have the idea first; what is the idea, and then how do you tailor that idea to the means? And how do you create a language that allows you to create that world? So, it changes. The idea is the most important thing, then the money [laughs] will dictate how that happens.

Image via Prime Video

Knowing you had done work with ballet kind of put things into perspective, like Galadriel’s [Morfydd Clark] dress in Númenor, the blue one when she’s doing the sword fight. How that moves as she does, learning that you’d worked with ballet, I’m like, “Oh that makes sense!”

HAWLEY: And also, I did that with Lucille [Jessica Chastain] in Crimson Peak. That movement is part of a character, as is, funny enough, I think sound’s really important for a character. It’s an interesting dynamic because everyone wants to do their best in their departments, but we’re always having this discussion with sound. Sometimes the rustle of silk is an important announcement, or the sound of a shoe. It’s whether your team, your colleagues in the collaboration, and the director allow that to happen.

But with Galadriel, it was all about movement. Elves are light. We did many versions of cloaks, even the cloaks that Arondir [Ismael Cruz Córdova] and the Wood Elves wore were all about movement and transparency, and trying to achieve more grace with their fabrics and things like that. Then, the fabrics that we choose for other creatures, like Orcs, would change. So, weight and that all come with what you’re trying to achieve with the character. It’s all an extension of the character and the body from the internal/external world. It’s all the layers that you tackle, really.

Image via Prime Video

It just goes together! Going into specifics now, let’s start with Gil-Galad. So, there isn’t a huge difference to my eye between this sketch and what we see on screen. How far along in the process was this sketch?

HAWLEY: I think I’d done several versions. Again, at the beginning, the writers wanted to go, “Who are these Elves?” And again, at their place in history, they were still finding a home. We hark back to Valinor and that world, Gil-galad and Elrond and Galadriel, the three Elves that come from that world. But this is probably a bit further along. I do lots of sketches, and then I might find something or a bit of something and work that. This sketch that you’re looking at is all pre-fabric, and then sometimes you work the fabric and those things inform each other. So we do sampling and things at the same time. So I’d say this was sort of halfway through the process.

What I like that I discover in the sketches is there’s a painterly quality, and about light, and how do we reflect that? At this point in the sketch, I’d be trying to think about what the lighting was doing. Sometimes that follows through, and sometimes it doesn’t in the process. But I’d be looking at fabrics, [and] our buyers would be looking at that and going, “Well, maybe we need to dye this and overwork it. How do we build it up so there’s not such harsh transitions between fabrics? And the light reflection of it.” But he was a sort of an accumulation of lots of things about Elves that we were sort of discovering that we wanted in the language, really.

Do you love how I didn’t do the bottom half? [Laughs] I’m not lazy, but sometimes you just want to capture– there’s one sketch that feels like a character that you go, “This is the direction…” and then you have to sometimes leave that and work on a mannequin or work with fabrics. The sketch is just a process. Everything is just a process. Sometimes the sketch won’t give you everything, so you can throw fabrics on a mannequin or come back to that and then build it. All the fabrics will start defining how things move and work. There’s a lot of that. Then the actor will become involved, or they’ll like this because they go, “Yeah, that feels like my character.” Sometimes I’ll have lots of sketches, and they’ll go, “This particular one feels like this moment I have in mind,” or it might feed something else in them. Like, [Benjamin Walker] asked for more.

More fabric?

HAWLEY: [Laughs] More everything! So it’s a tool. For me, the sketches are a tool. They’re not done with the idea of a finished concept art going in a book. For me, it’s part of a process that helps inform, you know, we had jewelers, embroiderers. So I’d give them a sketch and then the work crew embroiderers would start sampling, the team that was doing the beading, and then the jewelry would start sampling, the dyers would start sampling. It’s a tool to give the people on your team an understanding of the kind of effects that you’re after.

You mentioned jewelry. I’m the daughter of a goldsmith, so I have to ask about this brooch.

HAWLEY: [Laughs] Why weren’t you on our team?

Because she’s got all the skill, not me! I have to ask about this brooch, and what was the inspiration in this design, or was this something preexisting that you had sourced?

HAWLEY: A lot of it came from paintings. Of course, we looked at all the stars and Tolkien’s endless list of beautiful stars. It was so funny, we had Daniel Falconer on a team, and research up on the walls. When in doubt, a symbol of the Elves always ended up being stars, but we had to sort of create a version of them in this world, in this age. A lot of that came from feelings from paintings and riffing off Tolkien’s designs and things like that, and just sort of building on it. We were looking at the arc of Gil-galad, and where we see him at the end of this age when we see him in the prologue in the trilogy films. He’s more of a warrior, and there’s all these transitions that you sort of have to start thinking about. You take little motifs and go, “Well, maybe that can grow and change and become this.”

So, even though my job is just to focus on this first series and this first part of the story, every part of the process, you go, “Well, if they want to go here in five seasons, this could be the beginning of something.” I have to think big-scale over a character arc and small-scale and just down to the moment. So all of that stuff with jewelry feeds into that. Some of them are little references that feel familiar. The writers wanted me to add things that felt familiar to the world that we’ve seen. Some of these cross wraps and things like that that you see in the sketch echo some of what we’ve seen in Gil-galad in other forms before.

On that one, too, the pearls in that, there’s a big quote in The Silmarillion of Elves born on shores of pearl, and their love of jewels and Valinor. So we felt like Gil-galad would have taken a box of treasures. There’d been many battles and losses of kingdoms in the Second Age, so all these things end up as beautiful artifacts. Elves treasure things and hold onto stuff, so jewelry is a big part of that language of things from the past, as well as from the future.

Right, and this is such a jewelry-heavy series. The whole thing hinges on it.

HAWLEY: Yeah! Exactly. Not to mention the rings.

Image via Prime Video

So with Nori’s [Markella Kavenagh] costume now, pivoting from the Elves to the Harfoots, they are obviously very Hobbit-like, but a lot more nomadic. Can you speak to adding these kinds of nomad-necessary design considerations into an overall Hobbit aesthetic?

HAWLEY: Absolutely. What we all know from the Third Age of the Hobbits as we see them, as opposed to the Harfoots, is they’ve made that evolution. They live in their little Hobbit holes of comfort, and the yellows and greens are a big part of their color palette. Tolkien describes their colors very clearly. This is a different group; this is the Harfoots. We’re in a more primitive time, but you still had to go, “What feels Hobbity, in terms of what we know of Tolkien?” Because in this world, everyone’s looking for a home. Everyone’s in transition after the War of the Silmarils, and all these great wars of the First and Second Age.

I looked at highlanders, and these guys are traveling that range between the treeline and the mountains, and very wary of Man and creature. So, not a disguise, but that sort of camouflage aspect was part of it. We made these sorts of kilts, and all came from the vegetable dyes, the natural world. I sort of think of them more as our sort of Pagan forebears of the Hobbits. So it’s tying into that, again, the Green Man world, all those things that Tolkien was interested in. But the idea was that these are a little more nimble than our more curvaceous little Hobbits in the Shire and a bit more lean and hungry. I liken them to rabbits and hares. Almost the fact that when you see a wild animal in the landscape, whether it’s open ground or forest, they could just be still, and you wouldn’t see them until they moved or chose to show [themselves].

The headdresses and all of that part of the stuff was part of that language of camouflage and stillness, but also trying to help us with scale and that feeling. We made all these in our costume department, we made all these giant strawberries and blackberries and acorns. We had scales of acorns and all of that, so scale came into that. We did these plaids and prints so that we could play with the scale and contrast to The Stranger and all of those things. Everything was taken from that world, the vegetable dyes and soaps and things. But the idea was that they were sort of more nimble, wild creatures, really, in this world, and they could just wrap themselves up in those cloaks and disappear into the environment.

You talked about these differences from the Hobbit, but besides a greenish color palette, were there other inspirations that you pulled to show the evolution?

HAWLEY: Because they’re still a separate group, we sort of used dusky pinks and all of that, again from the berries and things. We had not so much relating to the Shire Hobbits, but their jewelry was things they found when they camped over old battle sites, [J.A.] Bayona wanted me to incorporate that. So this idea that there’s always a Middle-earth, whichever layer of history or age that you’re in, there are battlefields and the memories of past and things so we tried to introduce that. It’s about balance because there were a lot of nods to that within what our writers created, J.D. [Payne] and Patrick [McKay]. So trying to find the balance of what essentially makes someone Hobbity and things. There’s still that whole thing of the ripeness of fruit and food kind of felt a very Hobbity sort of thing. It’s always a balance of if we went yellow and green, I think that might– We hadn’t gone there, but there were hints of mustard, and the green is definitely a nod to that in the color palette, for sure. Their front door was just a woven one…

Image via Prime Video

I like that!

HAWLEY: Then we’d link up with the art department. But there’s a roundness to things. We padded out the shapes of their clothes and things a little bit, the proportions. Some of the proportions are similar to what we see of the Hobbits and the Shire from those beautiful films. There’s a proportional thing that sort of feels Hobbity; their waistlines and all of that stuff, everything feels a bit more rounder and all of those shapes. So those shapes were used to try and enhance that, whatever made people Hobbity.

And also, there’s a practical thing with prosthetic feet, and actually kind of a prosthetic sock that went up to their knees and things. So, our job was sort of to help with that line of prosthetics too. So there’s a lot of practical decision-making, and I think the most successful things happen when you have the practical answer as well as the aesthetic work together. That’s what we aim for as much as possible.

Image via Prime Video

So hopping lands once again, over to Numinor, we have Elendil’s [Lloyd Owen] look.

HAWLEY: Such a long time ago! [Laughs]

The note on this when I got it was just “seafarers.” So just for clarification, was this always intended to be Elendil, or was this a general seafaring look that evolved into him?

HAWLEY: No, you always start with one character. Because he was the captain, I started with him, but we looked at paintings of John [Howe] and Alan [Lee]’s, of Ulmo, the God of the sea, and things like that. We worked out some of the designs that you see scratched into the plate. The idea was almost like sailors carving into ivory and whalebone. So we took that world into it, and into the blues, which were a nod to the Elven world we’d seen before. There are links between the Men of Numinor and the Elves of the First Age, so it was sort of trying to find those links and create a sort of earlier classical age in it. So we were using a lot of references from that. A lot of the stuff, like all the scales and that, were hand-sculpted and then cast. We tried to use the hand of a sculptor as much as possible in making all of this. You don’t see it half the time, it depends on the light, but if you look, there’s sort of all these ivory scales, texture and all of that stuff.

Image via Prime Video

This is one I thought was fascinating because I loved Elendil, I loved all of the Numinor stuff, but I didn’t actually notice how intricately carved his breastplate and bracer were. So I wondered, for those who are now just seeing it in an image, if you could speak to what those images are, and what the inspiration behind those specific carvings were.

HAWLEY: They were images I took from early illustrations and some of that relating to back to the Tolkien world. As we were developing Numinor, Ramsey [Avery], our production designer, and the showrunners, we developed motifs; there was the sun, the undying sun, and I love that image. It was sort of like Icarus flying too close to the sun, and that theme of Man’s immortality. We also had the seahorses for the Numinor and the horses. It was like the Romans, their obsession with idealizing themselves as god and man and horse. So all of that stuff in. We also did the barding, so all of that linked up to the barding we designed for the horses. So they echoed the seahorse in their armor.

I like the comparison to Icarus because that now feels very Isildur-like [Maxim Baldry].

HAWLEY: Yeah, we go down these things, and not everyone knows that. [Laughs] It’s just part of that. It’s always like that, you know, the sacrifice and all these big themes in his work all the time. He loved the mythologies, the Greek as well as the Norweigian – everything. Our stories all have echoes in each other’s mythologies, so it’s a common thing, really.

This is like modern mythology too. It makes sense to echo it forward. On the note of breastplates, I wanna talk about the Silvan breastplate, Arondir’s look. Again, I’m curious as to what the design influence was here.

HAWLEY: Well, in the Second Age, you realize that the trees give the light, not take the light, compared to the Third Age. It’s a world where we have Ents and all of this marvelous sort of creature stuff going on that’s fading in the Third Age, is probably the right word. It’s more Man’s dominance. These Elves are sort of like the grunts in a Roman army. In this world, I always think Elves treasure things, but it doesn’t always mean perfection, I suppose. For me it didn’t have to mean perfection. But there’s a treasuring of artifacts and things in the past, and wood is one of those beautiful things, and the relationship to the Ents and the trees, and that world where Mirkwood is yet to be and all of that.

This was sort of based off the Green Man, as well, and the idea of the face of an Ent, and just all of that that was in their culture, the Elven culture, so it was sort of bringing that through. Because we had gone for a more classical look for the Second Age, it was bringing those themes in, and it seemed to sort of fit all of them. And our sculptor, he had sculpted all of this in plasticine before it was then cast and made like that. So all of it was hand-sculpted, this face and the leaves, and the shoulder pouldrons too. That was echoed from an Alan Lee sketch of Elves. Again, it depends on your actors’ physicality and that. Ismael is one of the most beautiful men and people I’ve met, and you’re working with their physicality going, “Well, that’s their kind of elf.” These guys are more grounded. They’re not the High Elves that we see in Gil-galad’s kingdom. They’re a different kind of creature, really.

Image via Amazon Studios

With Arondir specifically, because Ismael did so many like stunts in armor, which I imagine is fairly restrictive, what goes into designing around that?

HAWLEY: It’s so funny, isn’t it? Because back in the day, I was reading about Excalibur and that, those are amazing films of arm. And of course, everything was forged in real steel and all of this sort of stuff, but most actors wouldn’t wear that. It depends on what your stunts are doing, knowing the language of that. In Excalibur, for comparison, those moves are very sort of classical fighting, but now stunts demand you to fly through the air on pullback ropes, and all sorts of trickery and that. So we had to make different weights and different flexibilities and different lengths. So a garment like this might have 50 repeats or something like that, plus whoever’s the stunt double with Arondir needs his version, and we need to change the proportion to fit that actor, different flexibility.

We did spend a lot of time in fittings with Ismael working out what he’d need for different sequences and working with the stunt department. Again, collaboration is such a huge part of these projects. You can’t be an island. There’s sometimes we get, “Oh, but that doesn’t look nice,” and then you’ve got to go, “Okay, for this moment, what are the audience going to read? They’re going to read this part of it. Let’s make the rest work so they can achieve what they need to do in their performance and support that.”

Again, how you fasten these things together, all of that, there’s a huge amount of working out. Some proportions are similar through a lot of people when you cast. There are some things that don’t change and other things that do, like the length of a torso and things like that. So, you know, it’s not like one size fits all, but at the same time, you have to build up a stock that can work across this. So there was a lot of work. Matt Appleton, who was our props and armor, there was his team [who] did a lot of work on all of this sort of stuff.

So you might see one thing, but there’ll be— You know, for example, Galadriel’s night shift, her underrobe that she wears in the water, there were 100 repeats done of that. For a simple little garment with a bit of embroidery and pearls, that was a lot of work for the work crew. So there are all these little things, it’s just like a line of script that goes, “And they ran down the hall,” but it doesn’t describe that there’s a fight sequence in the middle of that. One little thing has amazing impact on your workroom and things like that, and this is one of those things.

With Disa [Sophia Nomvete], she is something in new in terms of seeing a female Dwarf onscreen for a meaningful amount of time. What kind of freedom did that give you in terms of designing her look?

HAWLEY: It was interesting because we hadn’t really, even in past experiences, done a lot of female Dwarves. But it was exciting to go back and look at the Scandinavian and Germaniac— because having done all that research about where Tolkien was getting his inspiration, there was a lot of that. And just to go back to, again, that classical age of storytelling, and going, “Well let’s start there and look at Brunhilda and all of those characters.” They wanted her to be strong and have a real presence. It’s trying to find those ways of how do we look at that language, but present it again in a way that suits the world that was being created here.

There’s the legend that they’re born in fire, that their god, Aulë, created them, and the mythology is that they were born from stone and would return to stone. There’s wonderful stories when you read about the creation of Dwarves. Everyone got excited about creating stuff for the new world, and everyone raced off and did their thing. Aulë made the Dwarves and politely got told, “No, you have to wait until the Elves come because they’re firstborn.” [Laughs] So there’s this endless chip on the shoulder, and it’s a beautiful little understanding of culture. If you’ve lived in England, there’s this sort of thing between the North and South, and I always think the Elves and Dwarves are like that relationship.

So there are all these wonderful things to draw on. They’re just great characters. At the same time, although they have Scottish accents or whatever, they’re not humans. They’re still sort of humanoid creatures. A Dwarf has a different physicality and all of those things. How do we do that? The first Dwarves sort of filled the producers with horror because they go, “Oh my, how many hours in the chair are they getting prosthetics?” One of the first briefs I got from everybody was that it cannot take a lot of time. We’re in TV, we need to find ways to solve this. So how do we do this and still make them Dwarf-like?

And a lot of that’s in the casting, always. With our beautiful Owain [Arthur] and our beautiful Sophia, a lot of it’s in the casting and working with them. But there are lots of things that we sort of explored, like we did with the Harfoots, in terms of physicality. I looked a lot of statues from the Nibelung, all those beautiful stories of the Nibelung, and all of that world. It sort of became all these things. It took a while to get the Dwarves. I tried many things at the beginning with drawings. We’re looking at a lot of gaming these days, so all that stuff becomes kind of very over-familiar and it becomes a thing. So it was like, “Well, how do we get them back to how they were first seen in their true sense?”

We went back to all of that stuff that Tolkien would have been looking at. And looked at statues and things. We looked at a lot of statues of the Nibelung because there was a kind of brutalist sort of architecture, and it’s made of stone. You read Gimli’s description of Khazad-dûm and how there was great beauty in that, but how does it still feel of that world and sort of organic?

These are all the things that came as part of the inspiration for that. Also, the richness of their world. We’re in the golden age of Dwarves as we are of Elves, whereas Harfoots are at the beginning of their sort of age, so this was definitely the sort of golden age. And how do we capture that in their clothes? With Disa specifically, we talked about her being of water. I did all these other sketches, which are sort of just big bulky sketches because everyone tends to think of Dwarves as these sort of mass blocks. And actually, when you meet Disa, she’s so warm, and there’s this beautiful, sensual quality and warmth in the lights in her eyes, and all of those things were just about bringing them out more. Makeup and hair created these beautiful gold lenses. There’s a whole lot of secrets into Dwarves, and layers and layers of stuff, so you sort of feel like with them, you’re sort of going through a door, through a door, through a door of secrets and things. It sort of felt like that with the layers of clothing and that.

It was also sort of like, “Well, I don’t want to hide her.” We did some mockups, even, of other costumes. It felt like we were just adding a whole layer that didn’t enable our actor to, in this case, Sophia, to be able to do her job. It felt like with prosthetics can sometimes feel like you’re kind of stopping the character from coming through, and our job was to support them more and more. So we sort of shoved all that on the side. It was one of those classic breaks of lockdown—joy—and I had a moment to think in the panic, and I went, “Oh, this is where we need to go.” So we went back to Sophia and went, “Let’s use all your beautiful physicality and make her sensual.” We were showing her statues of Brunhilda and all of that Nibelung, and that’s where the leg came in.

Then we went, “Well, how do we still make it feel Dwarfy?” And it’s not just noses and ears and things like that. We looked at the boots, we created these boots that felt like Dwarven feet and gold feet, that was part of the craftsmanship of this world. We did endless concepts for hair and all of these things, and then it becomes part of the collaboration. Everyone looks at it —showrunners and producers — and it sort of kept moving through that. But this sketch pretty much went straight into development after that because there was something that she could move and be herself, and it was just one of those things that just flowed from there. I think that’s very true of Disa’s character. In many ways, we were enhancing what Sophia brought to it rather than having her having to fight something.

And we were looking at rams’ horns, all these sort of Dwarf symbols. There are the ravens that we know from the group under the mountain, and then ravens and rams and all of this. So it sort of followed in the hair braids and all of that world and the scale of it. And she talked about herself being the water over stone, which I thought was a beautiful thing, which sort of linked into the singing and that. We took all these more organic precious stones and beaded that into the clothes. Again, it’s about reflecting light in a different way to what the Elves were and that. So it’s taking these elements that were Dwarven with the dust of the gold from the mines and all the jewelry that came from these precious nuggets of stone.

There’s a shot that visual effects did, this beautiful shot, with this giant piece of stone coming through. The thing is, Dwarves could look at a piece of stone but know how they were going to carve and shape it, almost see the interior of a stone, and that’s how famous sculptures would work in the marble quarries. So I think there’s something wonderful about the rawness on the outside and the beauty on the inside. That sounds like a lot of wanky talk, and I don’t mean it like that, but all these things sort of just came to be part of it. It was just a more organic thing, and yet still felt sort of part of the character of that world without just being the same Celtic motifs. It was sort of suggesting an earlier form of it. So yeah, that’s where she came from. [Laughs]

Image via Amazon Studios

I kind of figured, especially looking at the one drawing that has all of the gold incorporated into the dress, that this was sort of a reflection of their status as a mining population.

HAWLEY: Absolutely. We were looking at going back to the old Viking treasure. There are elements of historical world-building in there, Durin the Deathless, a lot of ruins were incorporated into stuff. Even her work. There’s a lot of work about the terrifying mask that Dwarves wore, so we designed a whole lot of forged masks, inspired by some of John’s work. We use that on the palace guards, there’s another sort of mask, almost like the samurai warriors would have done. Even with Disa and Durin’s children because, of course, there was a practical brief that, a turn around that we’d have to have lots of different children.

We went back into their past and looked at the famous helm that they made and used as a sort of mummer’s mask that the kids were playing with. So everywhere we could, we built in all their other histories and things. There’s a lot of that work that went on. When you look through the Dwarf characters, even with the extras, there are a lot of different Dwarven aspects and characters that we tried to create because they’re a complex thing. They’re not just a bunch of wild, joking, dirty– They’re amazing. They have many facets to their personality, and we had a lot of fun with our extras and creating some of this. I mean, the Dwarf world’s endless fun and excitement.

We made beautiful sort of dragon scale bodices for her and things like that, which we didn’t get to use in this one because it was a case of too many lollies and not enough scenes or time. There was a lot of stuff that was built for these Dwarves, and I think we thoroughly enjoyed building them as a crew, the cloaks and things that she wore. It was all about reflecting the fire. And Durin, his colors were the reds of the jasper stone, which was sort of another royal color that sort of came through. So there were all these reds and golds and grays, all reflecting the different precious stones and things. What we did actually at the beginning for all these characters, including Elves, to differentiate their natural elements that Tolkien always embodied his different cultures in different elements, we would have tables, and there were the berries and the leaves and all the natural stuff for the Harfoot, and then we had the pearls and gold leaves and things for the Elves and water, and then we had precious nuggets of stones. We spent a lot of time running into crystal shops and finding precious stones. It was a lot of fun.

Every young person that came into the department—we sometimes had little visitors of six-year-olds—would sort of sneak away semi-precious stones in their pockets and things. Nothing like it! [Laughs] But we sort of built that, and that would inform the jewelry and scale, and some of it would have to be cast. But the jewelry department spent a huge amount of time on our Dwarves. Some of the extras, or you might have seen in the Dwarf lords, these gold ears, and partly that was done to help prosthetics and their run of ears. So we created gold jewelry ears. But sometimes, again, you have fun trying to offer practical solutions to cross between departments. It kind of offers a creative solution to some of these things. So there’s a lot of that work. And Jane [O’Kane] and her department did a huge amount of work, not only with the Dwarves, but the Harfoots, creating specific textures of hair for the wigs, and that was all part of the scale in the world too. So every aspect sort of was particular to the race and culture that we were dealing with.

Image via Prime Video

You mentioned Durin, so I do wanna take a look at him. Disa has a lot of the gold and the jewelry and kind of all that. He’s a bit more practical, I guess, is one of the words.

HAWLEY: Absolutely. Down to earth. We have a King Duran [Peter Mullan], so he hasn’t taken that mantle yet, or incarnation. In the story, as the show writers had, he was spending a lot of time working down the forges and working down on all his little secret projects and things. So he was very much sort of a prince that wore his clothes very irreverently. He’s the sort of guy that would go down and be happy to get the dirt and the soot of the forgers on him and be in there with the boys. It’s a different sort of social hierarchy in the Dwarven world, anyway. He’s still a noble, but they wanted him very much to be a prince that wasn’t ready to take the next layer yet.

As soon as Owain walked in, he was the Dwarf that you see. This is him walking in in his classic tracksuit pants, and you go, “Oh, well, there you are.” [Laughs] As I’ve said before in another interview, he sort of pirouetted in, which was another eye-opener. Who thought Dwarves could be so light-footed? But it was a wonderful way to look at it. I think that’s the difference, again, where we were asked specifically not to– A lot of actors were scared that we were going to cover them in huge amounts of prosthetics and fat suits, so it was about working with character, foremost, to create these things and let them sell the job, which I think both of these actors did so beautifully. There are always things to moan about when you’re wearing a garment day in and day out. It’s fair cop. It’s not easy, but our job’s to support them, and there’s lots of little things that we did with both these actors that were things that they felt they wanted or wore.

But there were also rules that started to appear through the whole culture. All these Dwarves have the long beards; that’s something that you learn in Tolkien’s things. So we knew all the beards were going to be long. And then we had sort of little beard belt carriers you can see in that drawing. There are some jewelry enhancements, so everyone had a place to tuck their beard when they were working, or hide behind. A lot of those, again, the forging masks that we created, the masks for the palace guards, when we were working on the Dwarf farmer, all of that was about protecting the beard, this long beard. There’s a lot of things that go, “How would they do this in their day-to-day?” The beard was the most important thing. We even did this sort of, priest, you know, secret sixth level of Dwarves, and it was all about the beards and the hoods and proportion there.

For Owain, it was just working with his proportions and subtly moving him into the character that was Durin, really. And also what you have to remember, even though we had eight or nine episodes, we’re in and out of these stories. In one episode, we’ll cross to about three or four different cultures and locations. So we had to think very carefully about the changes that we did, that we didn’t have so many changes that you were going, “Who are these people?” Our brief very much from the writers, JD and Patrick, was that we always need to know where we are and come back into that world. So as the audience was getting to know them, we didn’t want to have too much shift and change. We wanted them to know exactly where they were coming back to with every shift in an episode. But these guys were so delightful to work with. They were. It’s easy to make Dwarves your favorites. [Laughs]

For our last set of sketches, we have our lovely Galadriel. She is, of the characters we talked about today, the only one that audiences might have had a preconceived notion about coming into this. So for an audience that’s used to seeing her in this ethereal kind of high lady aspect, where do you begin when it comes to designing chainmail and armor?

HAWLEY: 3000 years earlier. We’ve got to remember Elrond [Robert Aramayo] is like 6000-or-something years old, or something like that, in the Third Age. Please don’t hold me to that. I’m just trying to remember all the stuff that I was filled with at the time.

Elves have the wisdom—I’m saying this, and people might disagree with me—but there is an aspect to them that they have all this wisdom that we see in the Third Age, and this grace and stature of lady and lord and all of that, but they’ve had thousands of years to work their shit out, to make their mistakes. Even the Galadriel that we meet now has had the burden of the last so many thousand years of repercussions of what her family and her people have done between them. In the evolution of where her character is, the writers wanted to feel that this was someone still learning and all of that.

This journey in the Northern Waste, the writers specifically stipulate that she’d been on this for a thousand years. With Tolkien’s writing, there’s a lot of talk of chainmail and mail, and that’s not always easy to do on a show. It’s a lot of work, and then, of course, you’re going, “But what is Elven mail?” This is pre-Mithril, but it was an opportunity with a small band, group as such as they were, to create this, and I thought of all the moments, this is one that we could create chainmail because we’re not doing a horde of 200 extras and things like that. So we spent six months creating chainmail and welding it. There’s a lot of talk about the Elves are a lot like King Arthur’s court. In this world they have an elevated status, and we were looking at the work of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, of his pictures of depictions of knights and chainmail and armor, and there was a lot of beautiful drape.

Pre-Raphaelite has a romanticism to it, and it was an opportunity to sort of tell a story about the romanticism, but the age as well. Again, harking back to something I said earlier about Elves treasuring something that’s aged and the imperfections of something. We wanted to actually show that. There’s a little bit of—I’ll say this word, but I don’t want to be taken wrongly—vampiric quality, in that they stay youthful, but there’s a feeling of age around them. Why not show that they treasure that? Elrond wears a cloak that comes from a banner, from another time and place from Gondolin. So, it’s just trying to have storytelling, really. And we built all the stars and pearls as if they might have been made and created from the other world, from Valinor, so that there’s still the light of the stars, and the pearls were still all part of it. It was a rich chainmail that came from a noble place rather than Man’s world. So it took a full department of people to build all of that, and they spent ages building this chainmail and draping it.

There was a lot of experimentation and development trying to create this chainmail. And then we had a team that went back in and took elements out to create a lace effect in the chainmail for her. Many, many hundreds of rhinestones were sewn into it to reflect light. So it was an attempt at trying to do that. We looked at some of the sculptors of the Pre-Raphaelite period, and for the life of me, I can’t remember his name, but there’s this beautiful sculptor that did a beautiful sculpture of a soldier in armor, and it was very Galadriel-like, so we riffed off that, as well, because that was a huge part of Tolkien’s reference, his contemporaries in the Pre-Raphaelite world.

So, it’s trying to combine all those. It’s a little cocktail mix all the time, every time you approach a character. What is Elven? What are their elements? Who were Tolkien’s references? All of that fed into these and also the words. We had words stuck on the walls in our concept room, and because we were dealing with ice and snow, Tolkien would describe in The Silmarillion, which was such a beautiful sort of biblical description of things, and he talked about his heroes covered in the dust of diamonds, and he’s talking about the snow and ice reflecting off their clothes. But we use that like the stars and water and things like that to add our elements. Anything decorative came from those more organic things. And that was for every character that our decorative elements weren’t so much about braiding and that, but it was about the elements, that more organic raw thing. That was the overall theme with all our clothes to bind all the cultures together. The similar thing was that they all were embedded in their color palette, the elements of the natural world they lived in, and that came through all the characters.

Image via Prime Video

I have one last question. In an interview, Bear McCreary talked about hiding the Sauron/Halbrand [Charlie Vickers] twist in their themes, and I wondered if there was a similar approach for you in terms of the way Halbrand dressed up until the finale?

HAWLEY: There was layer upon layer of things like that because nobody knew who Sauron was going to be. In fact, we’d only get elements of scripts anyway because there was a need to keep that. But of course, we’re all geeks, and so we’d run about going, “Well, is it this person?”

I was doing the same thing, driving my friends up the wall.

HAWLEY: There was a lot of that! We did the same, to be honest. But in all of these worlds, there is a lot of shape-shifting going on. Even the Elves have their camouflage. In the Third Age, you read about the cloaks that the Hobbits wear. They would talk about, they match the gray of the stone or the brown of the fields. So there’s a lot of this talked about in Tolkien’s work with clothes and costumes. But also with Halbrand, there’s him on the boat as a different person to him and new man and that Numenor. So there’s always a sort of shift of clothing to become part of his environment.

So there’s a lot of that work, and sometimes there are things like insignia and story that we weren’t party to, but we were trying to support. In a way, it kind of worked not to know everything in some ways because when you get into it, then it’s becoming that– what’s that scene in Princess Bride where they go, “Oh, which hand have I got this thing in?” I felt like that! [Laughs] So we can talk ourselves around and around, but at the end of the day, it was sort of, “What is the scene, and what’s the intent of the scene?” And that’s what we had to do.

But for all the characters, there was an element of shape-shifting going on. The Stranger, he had his evolution, Galadriel had hers, the Harfoots have theirs. It’s an endless moving thing. Then there are five seasons that they will have to think about that. So sometimes it’s more of a, “What is the moment and the scene? And how do we serve that?” Then the writers have their own Uber arch that they’re trying to work to, and sometimes we’d be part of those conversations, and sometimes it was left to evolve, you know. So there’s a lot of tap dancing, you know, multiple hats that go on.

Kate Hawley will present her panel “From Concept to Reality: How Costume Design Helped Shape the Second Age of Middle-Earth,” at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, July 22, from 4:30-5:30 PT in Room 10.