THE DARK LORD UNMASKED: Charlie Vickers on Wig Disasters, Tom Cruise’s “Cheating,” and a Heart Free of Cheese

From the desk of Rupaliparda

There are interviews, and then there are confessions. When the man who embodies Tolkien’s “wholly evil will” sits down and, unprompted, declares that Tom Cruise cheated at freediving — well, darling readers, that is when you lean in.

Charlie Vickers, the handsome menace behind Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (returning for season three, courtesy of Prime Video), began his career not in the fires of Mount Doom but in a circus tent. Truly. A student production of Fawlty Towers at Queen’s College, Melbourne, saw his theatre shut down and the company relocated to a tent on a freezing oval — a setup he cheerfully admits was “all very Fawlty Towers.” His Basil? A real moustache, “coloured in,” with holes in the beard, and a shaved head so severe that the promo posters betrayed a desperate wig. Every great career has a costume department horror story. This one belongs to Sauron.

He jokes about a spin-off where Sauron and Celebrimbor become an odd couple — and honestly, we would watch it. But scratch the charm and there is thoughtfulness beneath. Asked to define evil, Vickers speaks of “a complete disregard for the feelings and wellbeing of other people,” recalling being bullied at seventeen on the Aussie rules football field for not being aggressive enough. “That’s the only thing that pops into my head,” he says, “which is probably a good sign.” Quite.

Then came the Sam Neill segment, and it was pure sweetness: on the set of Palm Beach, Neill re-enacted a Jurassic Park dinosaur sequence so a castmate could send photos to her friends. Neill played the dinosaur. Kindness, served cinematic.

The romance files? Vickers proposed to his wife in the Hampshire woods of her childhood — a forest scattered with fairy figurines from her parents’ enchanted letters. It was so muddy that the grand one-knee proposal became, in his words, “quite a deep lunge.” Love, sometimes, is a negotiation with gravity.

As for embarrassment: he once waved gloriously across a room at Mo Farah, who was not looking at him. The silence, one imagines, still echoes.

And the headline you came for: Vickers insists actors on Mission: Impossible and Avatar breathe oxygen beforehand to saturate their blood before freediving, while he managed a modest four minutes on plain air. “Tom Cruise cheated at freediving,” he announces, delighted. Take it up with the man on the mountain, Mr. Cruise.

He also campaigns for longer men’s shorts (“Harry Styles has much more muscular legs than me — there’s your second headline”), confesses to drumming in a year-six band called No Name Yet, dreams of a Sauron drum-off inspired by the sing-off with Finrod in The Silmarillion — and does not like cheese. Not even a little. Charcuterie boards, cold meat included, are “gross.”

Evil, it turns out, comes with excellent comic timing. Middle-earth, you are lucky.