There is seemingly no end to the menagerie of beings rendered in intricate detail across the sprawling landscape of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, from wizards to elven warriors, evil orcs, and all-powerful royals. Prince Durin IV combines many of their attributes: rich beyond all measure, not exactly human, and yet one of the most compelling and charismatic of all the figures in the series.
It should be no surprise that among the show’s six Emmy nominations is a nod for outstanding prosthetic makeup, and the video below shows the process by which actor Owain Arthur was transformed into the headstrong, wooly-bearded Durin each day during the production.
Noses are en vogue right now—and Durin boasts a unique one of his own. “We always referred to him as having a very proud nose,” says Rings of Power prosthetics designer Jason Docherty, who previously worked on the separate Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies for filmmaker Peter Jackson. “It’s quite a geometric nose. It’s got quite a plane to it. And it is a lot different from Owain Arthur’s nose when you compare the actor versus the character Durin.”
Some restraint was necessary so that the nose didn’t become overwhelming. “You can’t make the nose dimensionally huge because it’s made from silicone,” the prosthetics designer says. “If you put too much bulk into it, too much weight, it becomes too heavy both in look, but also literally becomes too heavy on their face and it’ll start pulling down. Those are all the considerations we have to go through as well.”
Docherty, who himself has hair down to his back and a full, chest-length beard, felt a certain kinship with the Dwarven prince. “There’s always been that correlation,” he says. “I worked on the original Lord of the Rings movies, I worked on the Hobbit movies, I worked on this show, season one, and there’s always been an ongoing thing about ‘You should be a Dwarf!’ It’s why we were doing makeup tests on myself.”
Another challenge was exaggerating Arthur’s features without making Durin seem cartoonish. “He’s a Dwarf, he’s a part of the royal line, so we want to create that level of prestige and presence to him,” Docherty says.
In collaboration with hair and makeup artist Jane O’Kane, Docherty devised the best way to make Durin’s hair, nose, ears, and beard flow together realistically.
“The ears are a slightly different story. The ears are actually large,” he says. “We’re pushing the dimension of their head out by pushing their ears out. Then that all gets balanced by the hair, the wig, and the beard. These are all massive pieces. So you can still see the ears even with that width of hair. We want it to feel natural, and we want the audience to feel like character’s head is actually larger than what it actually is.”
After Docherty did his tests and designs, he turned the work of Durin over to Simon Rose, who manufactured the various pieces and assembled them on Arthur each day during the production.
Anthony Breznican
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