Rings of Power star Morfydd Clark on fighting, fantasy and following in Cate Blanchett’s footsteps

Rising Welsh star Morfydd Clark has recounted the big news that made her faint during a film festival Q&A.

Morfydd Clark still can’t quite get her head around the fact that Cate Blanchett might be watching her in The Lord Of the Rings: The Rings Of Power.

“I can’t think about that,” she says, shaking her head a little flustered.

“It really does (blow my mind).”

In the long-awaited fantasy series, the rising Welsh star is following in the footsteps of the Australian two-time Oscar winner who played Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s revered The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies.

Blanchett’s ethereal portrayal of the character that author J.R.R Tolkien described as “the mightiest and the fairest of all the elves that remained in Middle Earth”, was a huge part of Clark’s childhood.

She was 12 when The Fellowship Of the Ring was released in 2001 and became a huge fan of both the films and the books on which they were based, saying they helped get her through some of the troubles of her teenage years.

Even though Clark’s Galadriel is a very different character – The Rings of Power is set 2000 years before the events of Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring – she says that having someone she admired and loved so much as a reference point was hugely helpful.

Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

“Cate Blanchett as Galadriel has been recited in my family home for the last 20 years,” Clark says.

“So those films and her have been a big part of my life, really. To have an idea of where your character ends up is useful anyway, let alone when it’s played by an Oscar-winning legend like Cate Blanchett.

“As a Tolkien fan, I think it was very daunting but I have high expectations and I wanted to do right by the work. The Galadriel we meet is thousands of years younger than the Galadriel we know. Galadriel at one point talks about how with wisdom there is a loss of innocence, which I found really useful because she’s not young – she’s already thousands of years old – but she’s more innocent than she will become and she has things to learn.”

The anticipation for The Rings Of Power is sky high, as are the stakes: the $360 million that streaming giant Amazon Prime Video paid the Tolkien estate for the rights, plus the $1.45 billion committed to producing five seasons, make it the most expensive TV series ever made. Such is the secrecy around it that Clark didn’t even know who she was auditioning for when she was weighing up whether to commit to what would become a gruelling, Covid-interrupted filming stint in New Zealand from February 2020 to August 2021.

“I knew I was playing an elf but I don’t think I could fathom that it would be Galadriel, so that was a big surprise when I found that out,” she says.

The news that she had been cast as one of the leads in such a huge show with such a passionate following was literally overwhelming.

Clark was at the Toronto Film Festival promoting her film The Personal History of David Copperfield when she found out – and promptly fainted during a Q&A and had to be caught by a security guard.

That was the first – and biggest – of many “pinch-me” moments, which she expects will continue well beyond the Rings of Power’s September 2 premiere date, with filming for the second season expected to begin in the UK in October.

“It’s just been a constant having to pinch myself job every time I had stood on set or met a new character and saw them in their costume and I’m like ‘am I really doing this?’,” she says with a laugh.

“And that was the biggest one – finding out I was playing Galadriel.”

Naturally, once she’d landed the part of Galadriel, Clark had to actually learn how to be Galadriel.

The Rings of Power is an original story adapted and extrapolated by writer/showrunners J.D Payne and Patrick McKay (Star Trek Beyond, Jungle Cruise) from the historical footnotes of Tolkien’s better-known works such as The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

As such, it takes a handful of existing characters including Galadriel, Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and elven king Gil-Gilad (Ben Walker) and fleshes out their backstories while introducing new tales and characters never before seen by the legions of Tolkien fans around the world.

Morfydd Clark behind the scenes in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Clark’s younger Galadriel requires her to be fierce warrior rather than a serene queen, which meant a crash course in sword play with some of the veteran experts who had worked on Jackson’s films.

Progress was slow for an actor better versed in period dramas than action extravaganzas, but ultimately satisfying.

“The fights and weapons training at the beginning looked very terrible,” Clark admits with a laugh.

“It was basically me dropping swords and moving in slow motion. It was three hours every morning with most of the cast, with lots of the stunt team who had been involved in the films. So that was really cool. It’s amazing when you have wonderful teachers’ time and passion what you can do, and I did stuff that I didn’t imagine I could ever do, and that was testament to them.”

Clark says her exquisitely crafted flowing blonde wig, pointy ears and the battle armour helped her complete the transformation, but she also derived a huge amount of pride from speaking Elvish.

Tolkien famously based the fictional language on Welsh, which the bilingual Clark grew up speaking and an encounter with Aussie actor Hugo Weaving (who played half-elf king Elrond in Jackson’s films) made her realise just what a symbol of national pride that was.

Robert Aramayo as the young Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

“He said my name perfectly, because to speak Elvish, he had looked into Welsh and that made me really excited because I was thinking ‘maybe all these Elves looked into Welsh’,” she says.

“Tolkien being fascinated with Welsh has always given me pride, just for being bilingual, and there are lots of bilingual members of the cast and it feels great to be in something that started from language.”

British actor Aramayo found himself in a similar situation to Clark, with Weaving already established himself in the eyes of fans around the world as the wise, worldly Elrond.

Having already dipped his toe in the world of fantasy playing the young Ned Stark in Game Of Thrones, Aramayo was already familiar with the weight of expectation that comes with adapting a much-loved literary world for the screen.

“It makes me nervous thinking about SO many people tuning in and watching,” he says.

“It’s obviously a real, real honour to play this role and be a part of this world. I am so unbelievably passionate about Tolkien and we all are.”

Some diehard Tolkien fans have approached this new adaptation warily, sceptical of anything that’s not “canon” and based directly on the master storyteller’s words.

After seeing some of the online chatter – positive and negative – and meeting some of the true believers at this year’s Comic Con, Aramayo is happily accepting of the fact that Tolkien’s creations and world mean different things to different people.

Ben Walker as Gil-Gilad, Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Robert Aramayo as Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

“That’s the great thing about it – I think his work invites you to make your own choices and inspires your own imagination and creativity. When you read Tolkien it’s endless … so I think it’s just the nature of people who just love his work.”

For Clark, the fact that The Rings of Power and Game Of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon are both arriving within weeks of each other is testament to the enduring appeal of fantasy and the escapism of being transported to fantastical worlds.

“I like how it shows possibility for other worlds,” Clark says. “And specifically with Tolkien, I think that there is a lot of emphasis on hope and mercy, which I think is something really useful to think about and remind yourself of. I really that people can be transported and take a break from our Earth and go into Middle Earth.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings Of Power streams on Amazon Prime from September 2

Originally published as Rings of Power star Morfydd Clark on fighting, fantasy and following in Cate Blanchett’s footsteps