WINDSOR.- What does it take to bring Tolkien’s Middle-earth to life? In part, ambition on a scale to rival the fantasy writer’s epic tales, if the set for Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is any indication.

In April last year, the production for Season 2 sprawled across several sites around Windsor. Shuttle cars sped hundreds of crew members and craft makers between vast studios and forests. For about eight months, nearly 90 cast members spent hours in hair and makeup to be transformed into elves, dwarves, orcs and other Middle-earth dwellers.

A building housed racks of costumes and specially molded or 3-D-printed trinkets and armor. Outdoor sets the size of playgrounds plunged the actors into a court in Númenor or the trenches of an orc camp. And nearby, machinery waited in a muddy field to film a gritty battle scene inspired by films like “Saving Private Ryan.”

“I kept saying constantly on set: more blood, more dust, more mud, more everything,” Charlotte Brandstrom, who directed four of the upcoming season’s episodes, said in an interview. (Some scenes set in Rhûn were also filmed in the Canary Islands.)

This, after all, might be the most expensive series in TV history, a blockbuster prequel that reportedly cost Amazon $715 million for its first season, and premieres the first three episodes of its second season Thursday.

Set thousands of years before the events of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of novels and Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations, the first season of “Rings of Power” sets the lead-up to the forging of the titular rings and introduced — or reintroduced — viewers to an ensemble of characters spread across the expanse of Middle-earth.

The season ended with Mount Doom spitting lava and ash onto the Southlands, transforming it into Mordor, and the plucky elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) realizing that the apparently helpful Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) was in fact Sauron, the supervillain the elf had been hunting. As the second season opens, “the chessboard is set and all the pieces are starting to play,” Patrick McKay, one of the showrunners, said in an interview.

For Galadriel, that means a slice of “humble pie” in the new season, Clark said, adding that the elf must adjust to having gotten it “so wrong,” despite her gift of foresight. For Clark, playing one of the most recognizable characters from Jackson’s film trilogy meant continuing to “shut out the noise.” After all, “you can’t try and do what Cate Blanchett did,” she said. “She’s Cate Blanchett! That’s a losing game.”

For the production team, the biggest challenge for Season 2 was the bar: “We have to keep raising it,” McKay said.

That meant more creatures from Tolkien’s books, including Barrow-wights and Ents, more harrowing battle scenes inspired by war films and, yes, more appearances from those pesky titular rings. But the new season is also a darker, more psychological exploration of the common ground between heroes and villains, and how evil can manipulate even innocent desires.

“We were so hungry for Sauron, for evil spread, for villainy,” McKay said. “Part of us thinks we almost went overboard, but we like it.”

For Vickers, who plays Halbrand/Sauron, it has been a welcome change, this season, to know he is playing a bad guy, a fact he only discovered two episodes into filming Season1. This time around, said Vickers, who is Australian, he could more deeply inhabit the role. “It helped me, this time around, to have a greater understanding of how I wanted to pitch it,” he said.

Vickers will play a different Sauron yet again, one who appears to the elven-smith Celebrimbor. The team experimented with different approaches to the character, including trying, and abandoning, a higher-pitched voice, he said. At times, the filming could feel more like theater work, he added, especially sequences with Charles Edwards, playing Celebrimbor, whose smiths in the Tolkien lore learn from Annatar to make the Rings of Power.

“We were basically on a stage, performing to 100 crew members every day,” Vickers said, describing the scenes between the two as closer to “a psychological drama” than high fantasy.

The pair’s relationship, a key story line in Season 2, is a “fresh flavor” for the show, McKay said: “It’s like a little Hitchcock in there. And also the sense of a descent and a very dark, toxic relationship.”

Edwards, a prolific stage actor, said he was struck by the similarities between the character of Celebrimbor and Shakespeare’s Richard II, whom he has played onstage — including the smith’s susceptibility to flattery. Edwards learned how to forge a ring, with the help of a jeweler (there is a ringmaking scene where this came in handy).

This sort of attention to detail was apparent in numerous aspects of the production. Although the series is set in the fantasy world of Middle-earth, “Tolkien’s world is really grounded,” Brandstrom said, and so “we’re trying to make everything organic and real and use the moonlight, use the fire, use all those elements.” That meant night shoots and filming in thigh-high mud, she said.

“It is all about the realism for us,” said Barrie Gower, a head prosthetic makeup designer, as he finished painting an actor playing an orc. Transforming people into orcs who still have full facial movement, he said, can take up to three hours and involves a mix of custom prosthetics, hairpieces, paints, dentures and contacts.

The series, which moved its base from New Zealand to Britain for Season 2, has weathered production disruptions, like much of Hollywood. COVID lockdowns stopped filming for its first season, and then, three weeks before the end of shooting this season, according to the showrunners, the union for writers in Hollywood went on strike.

“That was one of the most challenging moments for us as showrunners on this show,” McKay said. “But we had to stand with our guild and had to step away.” At that point, much of the writing for Season 2 was complete, according to J.D. Payne, the other showrunner, and the pair charged Brandstrom, the director, and Lindsey Weber, one of the show’s executive producers — neither of whom were in the writing union — with finishing production.

The showrunners were already producing Season 2 when the first season premiered, meaning they were watching the world react: More than 25 million people watched the show on its first day, the largest audience for the debut of a Prime Video show, according to the streamer. The critical reception was somewhat mixed, and Tolkien devotees, inevitably, had feedback for the showrunners, including on the show’s compressed timeline, the pacing, the casting and the characters’ accents.

The showrunners said that the first season’s reception affected “small decisions along the way,” but dismissed much of the internet’s nitpicking. “There are infinite ways you could draw Orion if you looked in the sky,” Payne said, likening what Tolkien wrote about the Second Age to the points of a constellation. “We feel great about the way we did it.” The pacing this season, McKay said, “hits the ground running.”

And for this second season, the showrunners continue to consider viewers who simply want to escape into a new world without reading the Tolkien books, poring over the first season or learning any Elvish. McKay said he wants his mother, who is not a Tolkien fan, to be as “emotionally engaged and delighted” in the show as lovers of the high fantasy genre.

Since Season 1 premiered, young girls have told Clark that they love her character, the actress said, adding that she finds this exciting. “Galadriel takes up a lot more space and is not apologetic,” she said, unlike most of the roles she has been offered as a woman, which, she said, had an aspect of shame. Galadriel “doesn’t have that, and so it is liberating to play her.”

Much like their season’s villains, the showrunners are thinking ahead: The pair have outlined a multiseason arc for 50 hours of television, and are already working on Season 3.

Ultimately, they said, their goal is to use several TV seasons to craft one holistic story that Tolkien never wrote as a novel — the epic about the battle for Middle-earth, the rise of Sauron and who gets control of the rings that are so pivotal to this world’s future.

“When you’re setting out the banquet table, necessarily, there’s going to be a little more lore and rules,” McKay said of Season 1. “Now, we are feasting.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.