Gollum but not forgotten!
As the team behind TV’s Lord Of The Rings is stuck in New Zealand...
WELSH actress Morfydd Clark won’t be seeing the green, green grass of home any time soon. Clark has been in New Zealand since October, working on the billiondollar-budget new Lord Of The Rings television series.
‘I was expected to be back in Britain,’ Clark told me, while the show was on a planned hiatus. ‘But not now. I’ve been calibrating in my head that I won’t be home...for a while,’ she added, with a dramatic sigh.
She might be able to make it back to her flat in South London — and then on to see her family in Cardiff — in the autumn. The trip might also coincide with the cinema release (assuming picture houses are open) of filmmaker Rose Glass’s scorcher of a movie Saint Maud, in which she gives a searing performance as a troubled nurse.
Clark said that working on the Amazon Studios adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mammoth Middle-Earth classic, in which she plays the powerful elf Galadriel, alongside Gandalf, Frodo and Gollum, has been ‘an extraordinary experience’. She will be filming two series of the fantasy tale.
‘Every day your jaw drops on the floor again,’ she said of the amazing scenes she and the cast have been preparing with director J.A. Bayona, who achieved recognition with his first feature film: the critically acclaimed Spanish horror movie The Orphanage. ‘His imagination is just wild!’ Clark said.
The actress praised New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, noting that the country ‘went into lockdown so quickly . . . which has been quite effective’.
NOw that restrictions have been lifted, folks have been encouraged to travel around the country.
Clark, 30, said that people from her homeland had always described it as ‘wales on steroids’, because of the rugged mountains and grey sky.
She told me her favourite film during lockdown had been Joanna Hogg’s BBC-backed picture The Souvenir, starring Honor Swinton Byrne and her mother, Tilda Swinton.
Clark and Oscar-winner Tilda worked together on Armando Iannucci’s rollicking adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The
Personal History Of David Copperfield, in which she played both David’s mother Clara and his first love, Dora Spenlow.
‘My first day on the film I didn’t have any lines and just had to scream while pretending to give birth,’ she recalled.
‘So I screamed. Then I looked up and there were Tilda and Dev [Patel, who plays David as a grown-up], looking down at me.’ Not many people noticed that she played two roles in the Film4 and Lionsgate release, which is available on digital download from tomorrow and on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday.
Morfydd made an audition tape for the role of puppyloving Dora, using her own Bichon-poodle cross as a prop. Later, she had coffee with Iannucci, and he asked her to play not just Dora but Clara, too. She told him: ‘I can’t believe I’m even meeting you! And you’re offering me a job — and another one!’
WITH a little bit of luck, as the song goes, the recent Broadway production of My Fair Lady will be heading to the London Coliseum. The Coliseum, home to the English National Opera, has booked director Bartlett Sher’s glorious version of the classic Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical for a limited season in 2022. However, the stage world is at a perilous juncture, with fears mounting that some theatres may not survive the summer and could close permanently. Sam Mendes argued in a piece he wrote for the Financial Times that theatre and the arts are ‘a giant economic growth engine’ and the Government should help sustain the