Exclusive: The Rings of Power’s Damian Del Borrello Talks the Sounds of Middle-earth

Similarly to the characters in Amazon’s The Rings of Power, supervising sound editor Damian Del Borrello has been on his own journey of sorts through Middle-earth. It’s one that started with a call back in 2019, and although it’s effectively the longest he’s ever worked on a show, he is nothing but excited that fans of the Lord of the Rings franchise are finally able to return to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical land. “To have it out, and to be able to talk about it, and to actually see the reception — for so long, we were with the picture editorial team and the production management team, and we all loved it, but we had no real idea around how it would be received,” Del Borrello says in our Zoom interview, a week before the series’ epic finale.

The Rings of Power takes audiences back to the Second Age of Middle-earth’s history, thousands of years before the events in The Hobbit and original Lord of the Rings movie trilogies take place. It is during this time, of initial peace as outlined by Nerdist, that the titular Rings of Power are forged (including the One Ring), Sauron rises again, and war unites the Elves and Men as kingdoms fall. A handful of familiar Lord of the Rings characters make a return in the Amazon series, namely Galadriel and Elrond (originally played by Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, respectively), giving us a deeper dive into their histories and movements.

Lord of the Rings Inspired His Career in Sound Editing

Considering the massive popularity of the original Lord of the Rings franchise and the scale at which Amazon is producing The Rings of Power — which could potentially cost $1 billion across its planned five-season run — it would be understandable for anyone involved to feel any sort of pressure. For Del Borrello, however, the responsibility he felt in his work didn’t differ from any other job he’s had previously. “The pressure is like any other show, really, when you’re presenting stuff to key creatives […] but there’s always a responsibility to do the right thing for the story and for your collaborators.”

Just because he didn’t feel any extra pressure while working on The Rings of Power, of course, doesn’t mean Del Borrello wasn’t unaware of the magnitude of what he was helping to create. In fact, Lord of the Rings is a franchise that the New Zealand-based sound editor holds dearly and with the utmost regard. “The original films were a motivating factor in [my desire to] go to film school and pursue sound design and sound mixing as a career,” he says. “They were quite seminal for me, and part of the reason why I moved to Wellington [in New Zealand] was to work with some of the people who worked on those original films.”

Related: The Rings of Power: An Ode to Bear McCreary’s Excellent Score

On Creating the Sounds of Middle-earth in The Rings of Power

“It’s one of the trickiest things to do, in terms of any creative part of films or shows: having an established world, and then creating something that exists within the universe, but is different,” Del Borrello says when asked about tying The Rings of Power‘s soundscape to the original Lord of the Rings trilogy while also carving out the distinction. “It’s probably trickier than starting from scratch, especially because those first movies were so good. They really were a touchstone moment in sound. And for me, personally, knowing a lot of the guys who worked on those films, the expectations that I put on myself and that I knew other people would be putting on us were pretty huge.”

Del Borrello describes the “aesthetic for those original films” as “like documentary, but fantasy, so it’s really realistic sort of sounds, natural and organic sounds, but still with lots and lots of detail.” He credits this achievement to the “interaction between the Foley and the sound effects, and making them as close and tight and in tuned and complementary as possible.” As a result, when it came to creating his overall sound team for The Rings of Power, the Foley artists were key players. “They really brought their A-game,” he says. “Our team is fantastic on this show. We were so fortunate to have been given the time to actually fully explore all of the different aspects of the soundtrack that we needed to.”

Whether it involved referencing the sounds in Lord of the Rings, leaning on the online encyclopedia Tolkien Gateway (“I basically had that open on a tab in a web browser for nearly two years.”), or discovering and creating something new with his team, Del Borrello ultimately delved deeply into Middle-earth. Indeed, one of the biggest things that he and his supervising partner Robert Stambler discussed throughout their work on The Rings of Power was “being able to close your eyes and just listen to the background, the actual ambiances, and know exactly where you are.” It’s nothing short of extraordinary what he and his entire sound team were able to achieve, and only solidifies showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne’s previous comments about the series being a labor of love. “Middle-earth is so loved. To do that justice, not only for the fans but also for some of my colleagues who were part of those original films, was really important to me.”

The Rings of Power is now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.