Morfydd Clark plays the elf Galadriel in the upcoming Amazon show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. This means she plays one of the leading roles in what is quite possibly the most expensive TV series ever made. That’s a lot of responsibility, and Clark felt the weight of it when she found out she was cast back in 2019, right before she was about to go on stage to take part in a panel discussion about the film The Personal History Of David Copperfield, where she had a key role.
“And then I just passed out in the Q&A,” she told Total Film. “That’s how I dealt with it!”
As it happens, there’s actually video footage of this moment. Below, Clark — she’s wearing the green dress on the far left — quietly excuses herself from the panel, presumably so she can go freak out backstage. She’s going to Middle-earth!
Interestingly, Clark didn’t know she had been cast as Galadriel at this point, just that she had been cast. “Morfydd moved to New Zealand without knowing what role she was playing,” said The Rings of Power executive producer Lindsey Weber. “We broke the news to her there. It was an incredible moment.”
“She’s so powerful,” Clark said of Galadriel. “I’ve explored a certain element of her power in this season.” We’ll see what that means soon enough:
How is The Rings of Power spending its massive budget?
As anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings knows, Galadriel lives in the forest of Lothlórien, although because this new show takes place during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the War of the Ring, we don’t know if it begin with Galadriel already settling in Lórien, whether she’ll travel there during the events of the series, or what.
But we know Lothlórien will feature in The Rings of Power, and that Amazon has spared no expense in bringing it to life. “There were hundreds of thousands of hand-cut, hand-painted silk leaves,” actor Benjamin Walker (Gil-galad) told SYFY WIRE. “And I knew there had been meetings where they had different shapes and colors and sizes. The amount of work that went into that small detail made me feel supported and humbled at the same time. These are the best craftspeople on the planet.”
It sounds very impressive, but apparently the crown jewel of the production was Númenor, an island ruled by a race of long-lived humans. They were a big deal in the Second Age but weren’t around by the Third because…well, you’ll find out.
“What you have in the city is history upon history,” said actor Lloyd Owen, who plays the Númenórean Elendil. “You could see how the residents had previously done something, and something was built over that, even in these little areas that might not even be shot. And indeed, Ema Horvath, who plays my daughter, was learning how to write Númenórean (aka Adûnaic) and she noticed on the set where there had been Elvish written and it had been graffitied over in Númenórean.”
But it’s not all awe and grandeur. The Rings of Power will also feature hobbits, known as harfoots back then. Things were a little less fancy in their neck of the woods. “I found out I got a job on one of the biggest shows on the planet, and I go to costuming and I was like, ‘What am I going to be wearing? It’s going to be amazing!’ And they put me in this big skirt and feet, and I was covered in mud the whole time, so that was a bit of a comedown,” joked Sara Zwangobani, who plays Marigold Brandyfoot.
"The prosthetic feet were a bit challenging at first, but we had this incredible team of people who kept refining them, and by the end, they became part of us and we didn’t want to take them off."
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.
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h/t Games Radar