ISMAEL CRUZ CÓRDOVA

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video)

As the ancient elf Arondir on Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, Córdova was asked to juggle scenes of extreme, fast-paced action with moments of incredible emotional heft. “Often you see actors doing one or the other,” he explains. “I’m having to merge these two lanes of acting. My humanity wants to come up, and I want to weep.”

Playing an elf, though, means displaying emotion in a completely different way from humans, even when the circumstances could not be more dire — as they are for Arondir in episodes three and four, when he’s been taken prisoner, stripped of his armor, chained up alongside humans, thinks he may have lost the love of his life and witnesses the murder of his best friend. “There is this elven way of being,” explains Córdova. “You seldom see an elf cry. [They] contain millennia within their behavior, their wisdom, their physicality. How do you put yourself in the mental and psychological position of being eternal?”

Elves value trees as sacred, so when Arondir is forced to cut one down, Córdova’s task was to portray the complicated grief of this sacrifice antithetical to his character’s beliefs. “I looked a lot at native peoples of the world, and their spirituality,” he says. “There are these portraits of Native American chiefs, taken at the turn of the last century, and you see the ‘thousand-year stare,’ and there’s so much within. That [was] a visual anchor for me.”

Córdova also incorporated the criticisms of the show’s color-blind casting as a tool to harness his character’s emotional power. “There is an allegorical aspect of being a first elf of color, chained and imprisoned,” he says, noting that he asked himself: “What is my own responsibility in the show, my own relationship with this backlash that I was already experiencing?”

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