‘The Rings of Power’ Star Morfydd Clark Defends Galadriel as Action Hero: ‘Her Serenity Is Hard Earned’
Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer “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.