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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