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How Morfydd Clark fainted at the thought of playing Galadriel in ‘Rings of Power’

Posted by admin on December 1, 2022 Interviews

Being cast as Galadriel in “The Rings of Power,” Prime Video’s prequel to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, was so overwhelming for Morfydd Clark that she actually fainted. The Welsh actress spent nearly six months auditioning for the role — initially without even knowing what she was auditioning for — throughout the summer of 2019. When she finally got the call that she would play the warrior elf, Clark was at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting “Saint Maud” and “The Personal History of David Copperfield.”

“I was already having an out-of-body experience, and then I found out about this just before the premiere of ‘David Copperfield,’” Clark recalls. “It was just very weird. It was really exciting, but also secret. I went to do the premiere, and I passed out on stage during the Q&A afterwards. It was so embarrassing. It’s on YouTube — I do manage to get just offstage, but you can hear my mic drop. I was caught by a Canadian security guard, who was very nice to me.”

Shortly after, Clark flew to New Zealand, where the first season was filmed (Season 2 has moved its production to the UK). Along with the rest of the cast, Clark had “ages” to prep for the role, which required her to learn swimming, horse riding and stunts. The cast trained together with a stunt team ahead of filming, which meant that everyone became close even if they didn’t share any scenes. Galadriel, played in the films in her older, wiser years by Cate Blanchett, required a lot of physical stamina and awareness. The immortal is a skilled warrior who carries herself with confidence — something Clark had to learn.
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‘Rings of Power’ Star Morfydd Clark on How Humility Will Play ‘Big Part’ in Galadriel’s Evolution

Posted by admin on October 19, 2022 Interviews

Clark is playing the younger version of the elven warrior, well-known to viewers of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ films.

While Galadriel has become one of the most well-known characters in The Lord of the Rings universe, thanks in part to her stately portrayal by Cate Blanchett, Morfydd Clark was drawn to the younger version of the character because of her still jagged edges.

In Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Clark portrays the elven warrior in the Second Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before the Third Age and the events of the well-known Peter Jackson films. Galadriel herself is already centuries old in the series and has already begun a quest to defeat Sauron, one of the franchise’s great villains, but she’s still young in her evolution and hasn’t yet found serenity or notably learned how to reign in her temper.

In the third episode, released Thursday, Clark, a Welsh actress known for her role as an obsessive hospice nurse in the psychological thriller Saint Maud, said she particularly relished showcasing Galdriel’s surprising arrogance while standing in front of royalty as the only elf on Númenor, a kingdom of humans predisposed against her kind.

“I’m quite interested in people not getting it right,” Clark said.

Clark, a self-described fan who said she has seen the original Lord of the Rings films “tens and tens of times,” said she hasn’t spoken with Blanchett about the role, as that would “be like meeting Galadriel herself,” but drew upon her portrayal in the films to help build the evolution of her character from a feisty fighter to wise ruler.

The actress, who spent close to two years shooting the first season alongside a large cast in New Zealand, said she does not yet know all of the details of her character’s development (Amazon has promised five seasons of the series), but knows the general arc.

“Humility is going to be a big part of her arc, I’d say, learning the limits of herself,” she said.

Clark, who has been throwing watch parties with friends to watch new episodes, spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about what it took to become Galadriel, from swim and fight training to balancing the character’s naivety with her immortality.
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‘The Rings of Power’ Star Morfydd Clark Defends Galadriel as Action Hero: ‘Her Serenity Is Hard Earned’

Posted by admin on September 12, 2022 Interviews

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is as big a TV show as TV shows have ever been, with a record-setting budget spent on recreating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth during the Second Age, and a cast of nearly two dozen series regulars and dozens more featured players deployed to enact its sprawling tale of the rise of Sauron.

And yet one character sits undeniably at the show’s center: Galadriel. The ancient elf, so old she was born before the moon and the sun first graced Middle-earth, was a crucial character in Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” novels and Peter Jackson’s “Rings” trilogy, as played by Cate Blanchett.

In “The Rings of Power,” set thousands of years before the events of “The Lord of the Rings,” a younger Galadriel is not yet the serene and wise co-ruler of the Elven kingdom of Lothlórien. Instead, she’s consumed by her hunt for the Dark Lord Sauron, the mysteriously absent master of evil responsible for the death of Galadriel’s brother. In “Rings of Power,” Galadriel is at once hardened by the millennia she’s already been alive, but not yet the stately (and formidable) woman of stature she becomes in the Third Age.

Somehow, Morfydd Clark (“Saint Maud”) manages to capture all of those dimensions of the character. In her review, Variety critic Caroline Framke praises Clark’s “arresting gravitas,” noting that “tasked with making Galadriel equal parts voice of reason and battling hero, Clark proves the series’ most reliable constant.”

A lifelong Tolkien fan thanks to her parents, Clark understands innately just how important Galadriel is. “My friends are all massive ‘Lord of the Rings’ fans, and I have to tell you, they describe her to me a lot,” she tells Variety. “She’s a living myth; a living legend.”

And yet, Clark explains that it wasn’t until she’d agreed to join “The Rings of Power” — and arrived in New Zealand in the fall of 2019 to shoot the first season — that she learned from showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay that she was, in fact, cast as Galadriel. Thanks to the pandemic, the experience became a nearly two year adventure, pushing the now 33-year-old well past what she believed to be her own limitations. She talked with Variety about training to perform Galadriel’s many stunts, how her Welsh heritage helped her with Tolkien’s Elvish language, what it was like to spend so much unexpected time in New Zealand and what she would say to Tolkien fans surprised to see Galadriel as a badass warrior.
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Morfydd Clark is here to slay

Posted by admin on September 1, 2022 Interviews

The mesmerising breakout star of Saint Maud is on a whole new quest… to Middle Earth, leading Amazon’s impossibly ambitious The Lord of the Rings series

Morfydd Clark and I are on a quest. We are answering clues – sent to my mobile – that will guide us around Kensington Palace Gardens and beyond, if we make it that far. Text Quest isn’t quite The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the Amazon show in which Clark will soon star as Galadriel. But the other, Tolkien-vibing activities we suggested, Clark sensibly declined. “I couldn’t do axe-throwing because I just think I would kill someone,” she says.

Slaying is, however, on the Morfydd Clark agenda. After supporting roles in The Personal History of David Copperfield and the BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials, she broke out in singular fashion as the lead in the highly-acclaimed British horror film Saint Maud in 2019. Her depiction of a disturbed young nurse on a mission to guide the fallen in her care to eternal salvation earned 32-year-old Clark a BAFTA Rising Star nomination. The Rings of Power, streaming on Amazon Prime from 2 September, is new territory for the Swedish-born Welsh actor on every level: a mega-budget global franchise in which multiple orcs are to be dispatched in a fight for the future of Middle Earth.

As the immortal elf Galadriel, Clark was expected to play a very physical role, so she learned to swim, ride horses and get a handle on slaughtering fantastical bad guys. “I’ve been killed a lot,” she says. “I’d never been the aggressor.” In order to get her and the cast match-fit, the production enlisted the same stunt team that Peter Jackson used for his trilogy – of which Clark is an enormous fan: “The films have been a big part of my life for years. They’re so embedded.”

There is, to put it mildly, quite a lot of anticipation for The Rings of Power. The series, set long before the events of the three films, is the most expensive TV series ever made. Estimated to have cost about £800 million, it is perhaps the Amazon Prime show that will put to the test its ambition to compete with streaming titans Netflix, HBO and Disney+. (The director J.A. Bayona tells GQ that the show is hard to categorise: “Television is evolving into a new form of entertainment,” he says.) Comprised chiefly of material from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (edited and published posthumously by the author’s son, Christopher) and appendices in the third and final The Lord of the Rings volume, The Return of the King, it will be a difficult spectacle to ignore.
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