For most audiences heading back to Middle-earth for The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, the main thing they’ll know Morfydd Clark from is her astonishing turn in Saint Maud. There, she was a traumatised nurse in a mental health spiral – but here, she’s swapped scrubs for swords as a warrior Galadriel in a near-total 180 from her breakout turn. But after years of playing characters ranging from scarred to scared, Clark needed to adjust to the demands of entering battles and action sequences in Tolkien’s world.
Speaking to Empire in the Glass Onion issue, Clark opened up about the very particular training she needed for The Rings Of Power. “When I was playing Galadriel, the stunt-team said, ‘You’ve got a problem, because you’re used to being attacked on film’,” she says. “I would flinch a lot when people came at me. So they did exposure therapy with me, where I would have all these huge, huge men running at me, screaming with swords. To stop me from looking frightened. Because I’ve definitely been cast as the victim. And Galadriel is not that.”
If it was a change of pace for the performer, the role of Galadriel was one she was more than ready to take on – even if, at first, she didn’t know that’s what it was. “The first [audition], I didn’t know what I was auditioning for,” Clark recalls. “The actress next to me looked over all sneaky and was like, ‘Do you know what this is for? It’s Lord Of The Rings.’ And I’m forever grateful to her.” She quickly got herself together to channel her inner ethereal warrior elf. “I went into the toilet and just stared at myself and was like, ‘You’ve gotta pull yourself together. You’ve been training for this for years. You know what to do, it’s in your blood.’ Because I’d been obsessively watching Lord Of The Rings for my whole childhood.” Sometimes, a role arrives precisely when it means to.
Read Empire’s full Morfydd Clark interview in the October 2022 issue – on sale Thursday 1 September and available to order online here. The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power starts streaming on Amazon Prime Video from 2 September.