Rings Of Power: Galadriel’s Morfydd Clark Sees Cate Blanchett As A ‘Mythical Queen’
Despite both having played Tolkien’s angelic royal Elf, Galadriel, Morfydd Clark and Cate Blanchett have never met one another. The lack of interaction between the two individuals isn’t surprising. Blanchett originally played the Lady of the Golden Wood in Peter Jackson’s iconic “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy decades ago, later reprising the role for Jackson’s follow-up three-part adaptation of “The Hobbit,” as well.
Clark’s Galadriel experience has been in serialized format with a completely different studio and production team. She is playing a younger version of Galadriel in Amazon Studios’ “The Rings of Power” adaptation. Clark brings a very different spin on the character at a much earlier point in her story (literally several millennia before “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” stories take place).
In an episode of TheWrap’s Unwrapped Podcast, Clark addressed the lack of interactions with Blanchett by indicating that the shortcoming isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as she has a serious degree of awe-inspired respect for her Galadriel predecessor. In the interview, Clark explained, “I kind of feel like [Cate] is kind of like a queen…I wouldn’t dare to approach. I do feel like everyone in those films are like my heroes – let alone all the other stuff they’ve done. Just from those films, they are like certified to me as like special, special people in my Morfydd universe.”
Clark doesn’t want to meet her heroes (for good reasons)
After clarifying her deep reverence for Cate Blanchett and what she’s done with the Galadriel character, Morfydd Clark clarified that she isn’t necessarily on the warpath to meet the Australian actress who blazed the trail before her. She said, “Meeting your heroes is not necessarily what it’s cracked up to be. Not because they’re not great but because then you have the social anxiety of you associated with that person.” She followed this up by saying, “So, I quite like that she is, like some mythical, kind of a ‘someone I can’t believe even exists’ person that I like to kind of see as my guiding light. And who knows what will happen. But I just think if it happens, I will be, like, incredibly awkward.”
That’s not to say that there haven’t been any mingling between “Lord of the Rings” actors and those in “Rings of Power.” Ismael Cruz Córdova (who plays the Elf Arondir on the show) made a splash when he posted a photo of himself and Legolas actor Orlando Bloom after “The Rings of Power” premiered in 2022. And when fans launched a campaign to support casting of people of color on the show, Frodo actor Elijah Wood posted a photo of himself along with fellow Hobbit actors Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd (Merry and Pippin, respectively) to stand up for diversity.
While the gap of time between the two Middle-earth entries, and the fact that Amazon and Warner Bros. have separate business interests to consider, makes it unlikely we’ll ever officially see the new and old characters interact, maybe one day Clark will run into Blanchett and tell fans all about it.
