Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - Galadriel, dark deeds and Irish accents

As the Lord of the Rings prequel drops on Amazon, Morfydd Clark talks about playing the Elf heroine, while the show-runners explain how Tolkien's tale was rooted in WWI

Morfydd Clark as  Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, on Amazon Prime Video.  

Meet the Galadriel you think you know. Morfydd Clark brings a whole new energy to one of fiction’s most iconic characters in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In doing so, she brings the ethereal, mystical Galadriel to life as a younger and bolder warrior.

It’s a fascinating take in which Clark brings an edge to the younger woman, previously played on screen by none other than Cate Blanchett. Even for the actor herself, it was an education.

“I was kind of fascinated,” she says, the day after the Prime Video series high-profile premiere in London. “I had to get to know the Galadriel that I was exploring, because I was only familiar with the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

“Reading about not just about Galadriel but the elves of the First and Second Age, they did create quite a lot of mess and behaved quite rashly and arrogantly at times, and I think arrogance is something that I kind of feed into because I think that's how an elf would show that they were younger. Also, there'll be a cosmic shift in Galadriel's world once the rings’ power is created. And so exploring her pre-Rings of Power was interesting.”

 Lenny Henry and the other Hobbit-like Harfoots speak with Irish accents in  The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

 Fans of the stories will be delighted to hear that there was a type of ‘Middle Earth boot camp’ where Clark and her co-stars spent time developing the fighting and physical skills they would need to convince in their roles before filming began.

“There is and it was really fun - I wanted to keep doing it. I had three months where all I did was ride, swim, climb and swordfight. I felt like I had a second childhood in those months.”

 The long-awaited prequel, which leans into the universe last seen in Peter Jackson’s films, is a huge-stakes investment for Amazon. 

The first series alone is reputed to have cost a staggering $465 million, likely making it the most expensive TV series of all time. Five confirmed seasons of the epic series, shot on location like Jackson’s films were in New Zealand, will likely send the production budget alone sailing past $1 billion.

For the stars of the show, it also marks a big step up. The series is expected to make them household names worldwide, while the sets and production - which introduce a new realm on-screen among many other elements - are epic in scope. Even for an experienced actor like Clark, there were times when the scale of the production took her breath away.

“There was seeing Númenor for the first time and its incredibly intricate, huge set they’d built with the docks,” she recalls. “Then there was going on to the snowstorm set, which is just a giant studio filled with snow. But you can actually see all the crew working that day because there were no physical sets - just seeing hundreds of people working and working on this was always mind boggling.

“I found it really wonderful when we had lots of supporting actors in when we had big crowd scenes. That would always transport me to actually feeling that I was there.”

A scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

 The Welsh actress is also curious to know how her neighbours in Ireland will respond to the Harfoots, a type of Hobbit who in the series speak with Irish dialect.

“I was so pleased that Harfoots were going to be in this,” says Clark. “As a Welsh person, I'd definitely be discussing that a lot if The Hobbit had been Welsh. It's always interesting seeing your accent and kind of being like: ‘Oh, I wonder why’, and deciphering that. I was really excited when John Rhys-Davies was a dwarf, because I thought he was going to be Welsh - but then he was Scottish.”

 It’s been a busy run of work for Clark, who starred in the well-received Personal History of David Copperfield, as Sister Clara in His Dark Materials and was strong in support in Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen drama Love & Friendship, which was filmed in Ireland.

But it was her leading role in the horror thriller Saint Maud, from writer-director Rose Glass, which was a standout from her and all involved. She plays Maud, a devout hospice nurse, who becomes obsessed with saving a patient’s soul. The low-budget indie was a big breakout hit.

She regards it as a big turning point in her career. “I think Saint Maud was a huge... I actually got cast in this two days before the first premiere of Saint Maud. That film was shot and we were all newbies - this first time director, it was my first kind of lead, first time DoP (director of photography), first time producer and I don't think any of us could believe how that was going to be received.” 

And you'd have to suspect that film was just a small taste of what's to come, considering the buzz around the Tolkien epic is already going into overdrive. 

 

• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available on Amazon Prime Video from Friday, September 2

 

The Rings of Power showrunners  JD Payne and Patrick McKay with executive producer Lindsey Weber the show's world premiere in London. Picture: Tim P Whitby/Getty Images 

Meet the showrunners tasked with bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s work to a major series.

It was the vision for the series of Patrick McKay and JD Payne that convinced top executives they were the people for the job.

Usually it is the show runners on a series who would bring it to production. But in this case, Amazon bought the rights for development and invited storytellers to share their concept for the show.

“Yeah, it is a unique situation,” agrees McKay. “Usually it's the other way around. In this particular case, Amazon acquired the rights to the Lord of the Rings, and its appendices. There's lots and lots of story in there. A lot of it has been brought to the screen beautifully before. But there's also a lot there that's untapped.

“Amazon had sort of an open door policy of essentially talking to almost anybody who had an idea for what show they might create in that universe. We were one of them. And we felt that there was this grand story that Tolkien had sort of laid the track for but but never dramatised it in full.

“The more we talked to Amazon and the more they talked to us over a period of months and months, I think we all started to feel like there was a marriage to be made here and a collaboration to be had.

“We were also working with the Tolkien estate itself. Simon Tolkien, his grandson, is a consultant on the show. And we had the privilege of working with all of these incredible Tolkien scholars, who've been illustrating Middle Earth for decades.” 

As far as Payne was concerned the lengthy, episodic nature of the series gave them the opportunity to take a deep dive into Tolkien’s world.

“It’s very hard to make a truly optimistic work of literature. But Tolkien does this amazing thing where he takes you to the darkest parts of human experience, which in some ways he lived through in the trenches of World War One. In his work, people die, people turn to evil and lose themselves. Noble characters fall prey to temptation that they never recover from. So there's real pain and tragedy and suffering in Tolkien. But there's also a sense of hope at the core of it.”