‘The Rings of Power’ Star Owain Arthur Breaks Down Durin’s ‘Vulnerable’ Episode 7

thewrap.com:

“Lord of the Rings” TV series, he was warned it would be long. And it was. But Arthur was the first person to audition for the role of dwarven prince Durin, and what he didn’t know at the time is that he made such an impression that he stuck in the minds of the production team for months on end.“I remember the casting director telling me, ‘You’re the first person we’re seeing for this role,’ and apparently they said, ‘Well, surely it can’t be this easy.

We need to see more people.’ And that’s what they did,” Arthur told TheWrap in a recent interview, recounting insight he later gleaned from showrunners J.D.

Payne and Patrick McKay. “They kind of searched the globe to see what else is out there and back they came to good old Owain Arthur,” he added with a laugh.To put it more succinctly: “They kind of went over and kissed a lot of frogs and then came back.”Arthur got the call that he won the role while on the way to a weekly football game. “I was on top of the world, I’m sure I played the best game of football I’ve ever played that morning because I was so full of adrenaline,” he recalled, but he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone just yet.At long last, now the world knows just what Arthur has been up to these past few years.

Over the course of the show’s first season so far, Arthur has brought a depth of both humor and emotion to the role of Durin IV, the prince of Khazad-dûm who stands to inherit the realm, but whose close friendship with the elf Elrond (Robert Aramayo) is looked down upon by his father King Durin (played by Peter Mullan).That father-son friction came to a head in Episode 7 (spoilers for which follow below), in which Prince Durin and Elrond skirted King Durin’s orders to stop mining for mithril.