Rings of Power star Charlie Vickers teaches Jimmy Fallon how to say 'Brat summer' in Elvish

You gon' jump if Tolkien made it.

In an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power star Charlie Vickers taught the late-night host a short phrase in Elvish, the fictional language created by Middle-earth author J.R.R. Tolkien. Vickers spoke the phrase "Sevin laer rhaw," which Fallon repeated quite accurately.

Vickers seemed impressed by the host's pronunciation. "That was pretty good. That was really good," he said. "You know what you said? You said 'I'm having a brat summer.'"

Brat summer, of course, is a phrase stemming from Charli XCX's album Brat, which has dominated corners of social media and pop music fandom for most of the season. "We had to look hard to find the word for 'brat,'" Vickers admitted. "Brat was really hard to find."

If you can believe it, Fallon laughed and slapped his desk, adding, "Not sure if J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that."

Brat has remained one of the most persistent viral sensations of 2024, as semi-ironic memes and TikTok trends fueling genuine enthusiasm for the dance-pop album. The project's signature bright lime-green aesthetic has even made its way to Kamala Harris' presidential campaign (and Charli declared that the candidate definitively "IS brat" on social media). 

Charli has also released remixes of several Brat songs — featuring artists like Billie Eilish, Lorde, Robyn, and Addison Rae — to continually renew interest in the album. Next month, she'll embark on the Sweat tour, which she's co-headlining with frequent collaborator Troye Sivan.

Elsewhere in his interview with Fallon, Vickers, whose character Halbrand is revealed to be the villainous Sauron in the season 1 finale, explained that he wasn't totally looped into his LOTR character's true identity. "I didn't know I was playing Sauron, basically," he said. "I didn't know until — in fact, I filmed the first two episodes, and I didn't know I was playing Sauron. I thought I was just playing Halbrand, and then the showrunners took me in for a meeting, sat me down and said, 'Oh yeah, I've forgot to tell you you're playing Sauron. This Halbrand character is Sauron.'"

In retrospect, perhaps the twist should have been obvious. "I looked back when they told me I was playing Sauron, I looked back at my audition monologues, and I had two monologues," Vickers recalled. "One was Richard III, and one was from a poem called Paradise Lost and it was playing a character called Satan. I still didn't catch on."

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

In season 2, Sauron also adopts an elven persona, Annatar, which meant that Vickers had to spend some additional time in the makeup chair. "It's a very different experience being an elf," the actor said. "The ears take 45 minutes each, so that's an extra hour and a half in prosthetics. The whole process for me takes about three hours."

Vickers indicated that removing the prosthetics was sometimes more stressful than the application process. "Actors talk about that a lot, right? It takes a long time to get ready, and makeup and stuff," he said. "But nobody really talks about how long it takes to get everything off. Like, for me, it's an hour to get everything off, and it was kind of scary because my wife was nine months pregnant and I was dressing up like that every day, so I was terrified that I would go to the hospital [as an elf]."

Watch the full conversation between Vickers and Fallon above.