EXCLUSIVE: Morfydd Clark & Benjamin Walker Talk Season 2 of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’
Morfydd Clark and Benjamin Walker sat down to talk the upcoming second season of their hit Prime Video show, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Set to premiere this coming Thursday, August 29, the two talked the most difficult part of making the new season, having ownership over their characters, and so much more. Check out what they had to say below.
What can you tease about the second season?
Morfydd Clark: “I mean, it’s even more beautiful this season. I think visually, it’s just spectacular and it was spectacular in terms of being on set, all the practical effects. And then it’s been elevated so much since we filmed it, so yeah, it’s very beautiful.”
Benjamin Walker: “In terms of the first season to now, there’s a lot of world building in the first season, a little bit of introductory material. Second season, we’re getting our hands dirty and we’re hitting the ground running. We’re covering some second age turf.”
There are finally the rings of power!
Benjamin Walker: “Yeah, well there’s that, which is impressive. We had a whole season with no rings.”
What was the most difficult thing about the making of season two?
Benjamin Walker: “To say anything sounds like you’re complaining about the best job on the planet. I’m not going to complain my costume was heavy because I didn’t have a beard. I’m not going to complain about prosthetics because I had two ears, versus six hours for an Orc. The hardest part was that you always just want more. That sounds like a non-answer answer and it is.”
What area of Middle-earth would you like to spend a day in in real life?
Morfydd Clark: “I’d like to spend the day with Tom Bombadil, because he’s insane. I think that you’d learn a lot.”
Benjamin Walker: “Yeah. I’d hang out with Charles Edwards, in the Smiths’ shop, just watching him work and Charlie’s hilarious.”
How did you prepare, if at all, for this new season?
Morfydd Clark: “I did lots of archery this season, which was really fun. And also, if anyone here is bad at throwing a ball, which I am, it’s a different type of hand-eye coordination. So, I was actually quite good. Which was a big shock.”
Benjamin Walker: “You have poise, which it seems like archery requires.”
Morfydd Clark: “Thank you. So that was really fun. I think that’s the thing that I love about fantasy is the connection to the past. Kind of run your riding horse or when you’ve got a bow and arrow or just when you’re wearing something that you know has been stitched in a way that’s been done for hundreds of years, this connection to history, which I think also is what’s lovely about Tolkien’s work as well.”
Now that you are into the second season, do you feel like you have taken more ownership over your character?
Morfydd Clark: “I think you’re like that from the beginning, to be honest because I think you have to have this quite clear idea of who they are. You’ve got a shorthand with each other now. It’s just such a privilege to do a second season of something and it’s so fun to come back to them, like old friends.”
Benjamin Walker: “And I’d say we’re all, some more than others, but we’re all pretty opinionated about who we think our people are based on our research- “.
Morfydd Clark: “Yeah, you have to protect them.”
Benjamin Walker: “… and what we want to do with it. We feel a sense of ownership and responsibility that I think is, in some ways, really welcomed by our show writers. It’s really collaborative.”
In this upcoming season, does Galadriel give up her driven nature and the motivations we saw in Season 1 or it this expanded on in the new season?
Morfydd Clark: “Well, she is going to have to choose who she is in this, or she’s kind of lost all sense of what her place is, because she’s got something wrong and the elves don’t really do that. She’s in this very vulnerable state of starting again and starting again when the world is in turmoil. And so, she’s growing and changing. She’s being guided, but she still has that fire in her, I’d say. Yeah.”
Galadriel in season one was the main hero of The Silmarillion. Now she’s like the corrupted one, can you talk about the evolution, the fact that this season, you are spending more time with Benjamin’s character than last season and how did you get to build this new relationship?
Morfydd Clark: “She was off on her own, which isn’t really natural for the elves. They need to be together. So, she’s back with her kind, but with her tail between her legs.”
Benjamin Walker: “And it’s a testament to Tolkien’s writing that he created a semi-perfect supreme race, that all of a sudden is fallible. That within the gray areas of each species and each world is beauty where they are finding themselves and otherwise, you have a cartoon and that’s not Tolkien.”
Is there a toolkit or master on set who helps you better understand the world?
Benjamin Walker: “We have help, but I like to think that most of us are, I mean, the number of times we get into arguments about what we should be wearing and how it should be done and who should say this, and that’s also part of the fun.”
Morfydd Clark: “We have an incredible voice coach, called Leith McPherson, who worked on all the Hobbits and she can speak Elvish and she’s just encyclopedic and she’s just one of kind of people that we can call to.”
Benjamin Walker: “Yeah. When you get into an argument and you can’t settle it, ‘Leith, Am I right or is Rob right? What do you mean Rob’s right?’ That happens quite a bit.”
We are going to see a pretty interesting battle in this new season, what was it like filming it?
Morfydd Clark: “It’s really exciting, whether it’s a battle or not, whenever you are in big set pieces with loads of supporting actors, huge sets, loads going on and we were really spoiled for that this season.
And those are, as an actor, just your dream scenarios because you are literally there in the world. You feel like you are in Middle-earth, and doing those scenes is thrilling and I hope they’re going to be thrilling to watch as well.”
Make sure to check out the first three episodes when they premiere on Thursday!
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo credit: Amazon MG Studios