While the “Rings of Power” prosthetics team are still making “oversized hairy feet,” the big difference is in the movement and tech that created them. After all, this is one of Wilson’s areas of expertise: “I started making hobbit feet in 1999, and I’m still doing it.” 

Wilson and the rest of the team at Weta made 1,800 pairs of hobbit feet for the four lead hobbit actors in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and Martin Freeman estimated that he went through three or four pairs of feet per day while making the “Hobbit” movies. After two decades and thousands of pairs of feet, “the technology has gotten better.” The latest iterations of the hairy feet that we see in “The Rings of Power” are more comfortable for the actors to work in, and look more realistic:

“We did that by thickening of the soles and different ways, and we made the toes moveable when they were wearing them to get more animation out of the feet and have it look less like a giant clown shoe that they’re wearing. But the actual look is pretty much the same — they’re big, hairy feet with mud on them.”

Neither of them sounds particularly comfortable, but the idea of making them more realistic and less “like a giant clown shoe” does seem like it would make the lives of the harfoot actors wearing them much easier. 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is currently streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes released every Friday.