Cate Blanchett wanted to play a dwarf in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies

To The Lord of the Rings fans, Cate Blanchett will forever be Galadriel, the elven queen as beautiful and mysterious as she is dangerous. Although she had her biggest amount of screentime in Fellowship of the Ring, Blanchett appeared as Galadriel in all three films, and then came back for all three Hobbit movies a decade later, because when you have a performance this perfect, you get the most out of it.

And if Blanchett had her way, she would have spent even more time in Middle-earth. She recently appeared on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, and revealed that she pitched director Peter Jackson on playing a wholly different character in addition to Galadriel. “For me it was super quick,” Blanchett said of working on the movies. “There’s not too many chicks in the Tolkien universe. I loved it so much and I did say to Peter and Fran, they were doing a banquet scene with a whole lot of dwarves. I always wanted to play the bearded lady, so I asked them, ‘Could I be your hairy wife woman when you pan across the banquet table of dwarves?’”

Obviously, this didn’t work out — it was a timing issue, according to Blanchett — but that would have been one entertaining Easter egg. And lest we forget, women dwarves do look a lot like the men, as Gimli helpfully explained in The Two Towers:

Although — and help me out if I’m wrong here, fellow LOTR fans — I don’t remember a banquet scene with lots of dwarves in the original Lord of the Rings movies. I wonder if she was talking about The Hobbit movies, which had a lot more dwarves? Or I could just be forgetting; it’s been a while since I’ve seen the trilogy.

You can listen to the full interview on the WTF podcast. And Cate Blanchett is currently starring in Mrs. America on FX, where she’s tearing it up, as per usual.

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h/t Indiewire