How Morfydd Clark fainted at the thought of playing Galadriel in ‘Rings of Power’
In a scene straight out of Tolkien, Morfydd Clark has his first encounter with the Queen of shee
MORFYDD CLARK has been told a story on his childhood by one of his teachers, a man he has never met, about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The story turns out to have come not from an Arthurian legend but a folk tale from the Welsh bards, and it is now more than 80 years since Lewis published his book. “I was quite impressed with it,” says the 38-year-old star who plays Galadriel in the new adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” on screen. “I remember thinking: ‘Wow, Tolkien can draw me in like that!'”
But this is a completely new world for Clark, who only found out that he would act in the new film – set 50 years before the events of the “Ring” – when he was approached by the producers. “I had an audition and the casting director said: ‘Do you want to play Galadriel?’ I said: ‘Why does she have a horse’s head on her left side?’ I’d seen pictures of actors playing her, and I just assumed I was in the wrong movie. My agent rang up and said they’d heard I was doing ‘The Lord of the Rings’… and he couldn’t find anyone else.
“I’ve never been so flattered in my life. I mean, it took me literally a year – I couldn’t think of anything else to do – to get the part.”
Clark’s role, as it became known, in “The Lord of the Rings” has been the subject of much speculation about its nature. “The thing was, in the book, if you look at it, I am Galadriel’s first-ever knight,” he explains. “The book says ‘The first true knight she ever had’.” In the story, Galadriel was born to the Lord of the Nazgûl, a giant with a horse’s head on one side and human skin on the other,