‘The Rings of Power’ star Lloyd Owen dishes on his ‘reluctant hero’ in Prime’s ‘LOTR’ show
Lloyd Owen’s role in Prime Video’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” has been a long time coming.
“I read ‘The Hobbit’ when I was about 11 years old, and by the time my son got to about that age, we started reading it together as a bedtime story,” Owen, 56 (“You, Me, and the Apocalypse”) told The Post.
“Tolkien’s imagination had such a powerful effect on me when I was younger, and I doubled down on reading it with my son. So, it’s been joyous to re-read everything, and then to read everything I didn’t know was out there, properly – ‘The Silmarillion’ and all of Tolkien’s writings.
“It’s been a wonderful journey of discovery and it’s very exciting to be part of it.”
“The Rings of Power,” premiering Sept. 1, is set around a thousand years before the events of Peter Jackson’s “Rings” movies. Owen plays Elendil, a character from Tolkien lore who is known as a great warrior and the first King of Gondor and Arnor. One of his sons includes Isildur (Maxim Baldry), who appeared in the prologue montage of “The Fellowship of the Ring” (as Aragorn’s ancestor who cut the Ring off of Sauron’s hand). Elendil also works with the Elves, including Galadriel (Morfydd Clark).
“People who know the books will know that Elendil dies in the last alliance of elves and men. He has a self-sacrificial death against Sauron,” Owen said. “Where we find him at the beginning of the series, he’s a sea captain. He’s the father of three adult children, he’s been widowed and he’s trying to hold that family together. I think the way [creators J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay] have set this up is brilliant. What Tolkien has actually written about Elendil is sparse. There are signposts along the way, but we know very little about him [and] he’s sort of a hero archetype. Throughout the beginning [of the series] he’s far from being a leader.
“One of the privileges of this role is that he starts from a very simple point in life, and has no idea about leadership or kingship or anything,” he said. “That will be his journey — he’s a reluctant hero. He doesn’t really want to get involved, but it’s bigger than him.”
The production has a notoriously hefty price tag, and Owen said he was wowed by the sets, especially in the kingdom of Númenor, where much of his story takes place.
“In the era of CGI and the fact that this is Amazon and a big-budget production – you imagine there would be a lot of green screen. But they did the opposite,” he said. “They built almost everything. I hardly remember standing anywhere near a green screen in my experience in the city of Numenor, which you’ll see in Episode 3 and onward.
“It was the most fantastic piece of set design I think I’ve experienced. The history of the world and the city – they built up layer upon layer,” he said. “There was one wall down a side alley, where the art department had Elvish carved into the stone, and that had been graffitied over by Numenorian writing. That is the crux of the problem in Numenorean society: there’s the beginning of a schism between what are called the Kings men — who are more nationalistic and want to be immortal like the Elves — and the more faithful and loyal side to the Elves. And they had done that [layered graffiti] and it was down a little alleyway that we would never have filmed in.
“That was the level of attention to detail.”
