With a franchise as big as J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” fans are always going to have a lot of opinions and desire to weigh in. And, for the stars of “The Rings of Power,” that can be both hurtful and helpful.
For Cynthia Addai-Robinson, who plays Queen Regent Míriel in the Prime Video series, it’s fun to watch the gears in fans’ heads turn as they theorize what’s coming and who’s who in the show. “They really are so thoughtful about how they arrive at these theories and conclusions,” she noted in a recent interview with Us Weekly.
That said, she does note that giving too much attention or credence to those theories while actually filming can be “a slippery slope.”
“I feel like everybody would agree that you don’t want it to necessarily inform what you’re doing,” Addai-Robinson explained to TheWrap at the IMDboat at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday. “I mean, everybody’s process is different. But I think you almost have to really tune out and be protective of yourself and your character.”
She continued, “We all have such ownership of these characters. In a way, these are our interpretations of these characters. So I mean, it’s different for everyone.”
Indeed, Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel on the show, noted that ahead of filming season one, looking at fan posts online was actually a tool for her.
“Pre-filming season one, I think I did learn a lot from lots of, kind of Tolkien experts on Twitter and Tiktok,” she admitted. “Because it’s so deep, there’s so much going on, and what’s so lovely about the community is that everyone’s like, ‘What do you know that I don’t?’ So you can just endlessly learn.”
She added that she owes them “a great debt, for just the knowledge that they give openly to the world.”
Ismael Cruz Córdova largely agreed with Clark, especially because his character Arondir was created specifically for the show. So, while he doesn’t have any specific stories to read to learn about his character, fans using their knowledge to come up with ideas about his background helped him “quite a bit.”
“Piggybacking on Morfydd, Tolkien is dense,” he said. “And I get extremely distracted reading and all these things. And also, my character does not exist in the lore. But people have wanted to, like — I’m trying to imagine my ancestry and it’s been so incredibly helpful because I mean, I’ll have this genealogy that I was not aware of. And the crossings, and why and the reasons, it’s given me a backstory that doesn’t exist in the books.”
For Daniel Weyman, who plays The Stranger, the idea of letting outsiders weigh in on a character of his “falls into two different camps.”
“The first one, like when I’m prepping for a character, a new role, that level of research – I could sort of do search for as long as it takes,” he said. “There’s scripts, you can suck info from various different you know, people that have wide knowledge, or you can do books, you can do it however you want. But that info tends to give a kind of scaffold to character for me, and it sort of sits really deep in the ground. And you can always go back to the roots into it.”
He continued, “So that at that stage, being able to listen to everything and go,’OK, well, I’m gonna take that and use that’ or ‘Thanks, but I’m gonna let that one go.’ That’s quite possible.”
But, when Weyman actually starts production as a character, he agrees with Addai-Robinson that it can be a slippery slope. In fact, Weyman recalled working in a theater production at one point where he listened to others too much, and ended up taking one specific note too seriously.
“And so I think for me, that’s the danger when I’m doing it. And also when the showrunners give us the scenes, like there’s so much in the scene, there’s so much in the story already that, you know, that’s the stuff that I like to get involved with.”
“Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” returns for season two on Prime Video on August 29.
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