A lifelong
Lord of the Rings fan, the actor hopes her elven-warrior character will escape her “haze of misery” in the second season.
By
Rebecca Ford
April 11, 2023
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywoo...-star-morfydd-clark-interview-awards-insider#
Morfydd Clark grew up assuming that everyone was as obsessed with
The Lord of the Rings as her family was. Raised in Wales, Clark felt especially drawn to the J.R.R. Tolkien stories when she was struggling at school. “I loved to be transported from the four walls of school,” says Clark. “I’d love then coming home and thinking about all these magical things and all these possibilities.”
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After leaving school at 16, she pursued a career in acting and trained at the National Youth Theatre of Wales and the Drama Centre London. After some notable work onstage and on television, she received a best-actress BAFTA nomination in 2020 for starring in the psychological horror film
Saint Maud.
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Then a mysterious audition for an Amazon TV series changed her life forever, when she was cast as Galadriel, the iconic elf from the Tolkien stories, previously played by
Cate Blanchett in the films. The first season of Amazon’s ambitious fantasy series
The Rings of Power sees a younger version of the elven warrior on a mission, convinced that the evil force Sauron—who killed her brother—has returned to Middle-earth.
Now in the middle of filming the second season in the UK, Clark spoke with
Little Gold Men about her unusual journey to Galadriel, how she handles fan reactions to the show, and what we can expect from season two.
Vanity Fair: There was a lot of secrecy around this project when it was casting. What was that process like for you?
Morfydd Clark: I got an audition from my agent, and it was for this untitled Amazon project. All I knew about the character was that she’d experienced some loss and had been to war at one point. Then I arrived at the audition, and one of the actresses was next to me and we started chatting, and she was like, “Can you believe we’re auditioning for
Lord of the Rings?” And I was like, “What?!” I had to go into the bathroom and have a moment breathing in deeply, staring at myself, being like, You’ve gotta turn up, Morfydd. You’ve watched these films. You’ve read these books. You’ve been waiting for this. I looked at everything I’d prepared and tried to make it suddenly be like I was in Middle-earth.
When did you find out you would actually be playing Galadriel?
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I didn’t realize I was playing Galadriel until I was there [in New Zealand]. I remember that before I found out I had the job, I was going to the Toronto Film Festival for the first time. It was like a year where everything kind of went mental for me, really. I was told that by the time I got off the plane, I’d have an answer. And so I found out that I had the job there. And then I got to New Zealand, knew I was playing an elf, and was trying to decipher what I was, and eventually I was taken to a room and told. My immediate thought was, Oh, no. I can’t do it. But then, I think if I’d known for the whole time as I was preparing to go out there, I also would have driven myself crazy. It's just a big thing to find out whenever you do.
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Did that change how you prepared? Did you study how Cate played the role?
Well, I can’t under-study those films because I watched them so obsessively and had the books read to me. They were always just going to be there as a wonderful inspiration. And it’s quite nice sometimes to feel that the character that I’m playing at this point, to imagine at one point she’ll be at peace. I think with a lot of characters you’re playing, their ultimate goal is to find that, but lots of them don’t.
It’s like you got to read the end of the book first.
Which I actually do the opposite of. I don’t finish books when I know they’re not going to end how I want them to, which is one of my most toxic traits, apparently.
As someone familiar with these stories, what was the hardest learning curve for you as you were preparing to play this role?
The idea of playing someone immortal was something that I thought and talked about endlessly. Something that I ended up sticking with was that I think we are living in a time where we are reckoning with our past, and we are learning from our past, and we are learning about the consequences of mistakes that happened before we were born. But that, as an elf, she’s like living history. So it was trying to think about what it would feel like to have all the weight of that guilt, not just from the past, but you were there.
Between the new language and the physical demands of this character, what did you find most difficult?
I loved the language aspect. I’m Welsh-speaking and when I was first reading
The Hobbit, my mom was super keen to be like, “Did you know he was obsessed with Welsh and he based one of the elvish languages on Welsh?” So that was always something I’d found really exciting about it. And the way that they wrote the elves was really fun as well—they created a kind of rhythm to the way they spoke. So there was something quite classical about it that felt almost Shakespearean, which was really fun.
Physicality-wise was much more frightening. I’ve spent a lot of my career attacked and maimed and wounded and killed. I’m very good at screaming and being terrified. Obviously, Galadriel is not that. I worked with some amazing people. It felt like when people find a little kitten on the side of the road, and it’s too scared to come to them. They coaxed me out with little bits, and then eventually I was somehow confident enough to do that stuff on set.
Now that the first season has aired, how are you taking in feedback on your character and the show?
Because I’m a fan of this type of genre, I’ve read books that have then been turned into things, and I’ve been like, I don’t think the house would’ve looked like that. So, I really get it. What’s so wonderful about these worlds and these characters is that they don’t exist and yet they do so intensely in so many minds. So I think there’s an idea that you can’t please everyone. But also, I do respect the ownership of her because I know if I was on the other side, I’d also be feeling like that. I feel very protective about that. I feel quite protective of making sure she’s safe from harm.
Clark in
Rings of Power
Courtesy of Prime Video
Does it feel different filming the second season now that the first season has been a success and you can have that confidence in the project?
The summer before this was coming out was wild inside my mind. It was just so frightening and so scary. Not knowing how it’d be received, but also because we didn’t see it till really late, because obviously there needs to be so much care taken, protecting the material. So yes, it feels good to be coming back to it just knowing a bit more about the world. Because also, it’s in knowing that you can cope with it as well, because there was a fear of how it was gonna be received. What if people don’t like it? And then you realize that you are just putting something out there for people to watch. Once I relinquished, it was good.
Obviously, this is one of the most secretive shows on television, but what can you say about where your character goes this season after the events that transpired at the end of the first season?
I need to take a deep breath before I do this because I get panicked. [
Laughs] So last season I think that her grief was so intense, her sadness was so huge. I think when you are in those points of ultimate lows, you do end up becoming self-obsessed. You can’t see anything beyond this haze of misery. And now that has started to clear. Hopefully, with that she’s rediscovering the beauty of life and what she was really trying to protect the whole time beyond herself. That’s something I just love about Tolkien: You need to be connected to the world and those around you.
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