“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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