Rings of Power star Lloyd Owen talks Elendil and geeking out over Elvish

Devan Coggan
·9 min read
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The first few episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power introduce a whole fellowship of new faces. Some — like Morfydd Clark's Galadriel or Robert Aramayo's Elrond — will be familiar to book readers or fans of Peter Jackson's film trilogy. Others are entirely new inventions, dwarves and elves and men crafted to help flesh out the show's rich mythology.

And then there are characters like Elendil. Lloyd Owen plays the stoic Númenórean sea captain, who debuts in the third episode of The Rings of Power. If you've read J.R.R. Tolkien's books or seen the Jackson films, you know the basics of his story: He has a key role to play in the eventual battle against Sauron, and it's his sword Narsil that shatters into pieces, only to be reforged centuries later and wielded by his descendent Aragorn.

But when The Rings of Power begins, Elendil is not yet a myth — just a man. The future king of Gondor pops up frequently throughout Tolkien's work, but the author never described him with any depth. Here, the show takes care to flesh him out, introducing him not as some grand leader but as a loyal ship captain, a widower raising his son Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and his daughter Eärien (Ema Horvath). From the moment he pulls Galadriel onto his boat, he has a quiet nobility to him, with hints of grief rippling just beneath the surface.

EW recently sat down with Owen for our All Rings Considered podcast, and here, he opens up about Elendil's journey and setting sail for the island kingdom of Númenor.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Prime Video Lloyd Owen as Elendil in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The third episode introduces Númenor, and we finally get to meet Elendil. He's one of those characters who's mentioned constantly throughout Tolkien's work, but we've never seen him depicted on screen with any depth. How did you want to breathe life into this mythic figure?

LLOYD OWEN: That's the great privilege of this job, actually, that he is this iconic character. He's a hero archetype. But Tolkien wrote very little about him. There are just a few signposts along the way to his death. It's a great opportunity to open him up as a fully three-dimensional human being, and I think JD [Payne] and Patrick [McKay], our showrunners, have done a great job so far setting this man up. They've added that he's recently widowed, that he's trying to bring up some grieving adult children who are also struggling, and that he's recently moved into the capital city of Númenor right at the point where civil society might be breaking down, potentially. The personal and the political are perfectly combined in him. That's the great excitement of it, as well as the responsibility, obviously, of hopefully fulfilling people's expectations and imaginations.

I love that relationship we see with his children, Isildur and Eärien. Tell me about working with Maxim Baldry and Ema Horvath to figure out that family dynamic.

Well, when we were locked down together in New Zealand while we were filming, the cast and crew very quickly become your family because there wasn't anyone else around. Particularly with us three, we created a little home away from home together, and we'd have Sunday lunches where we'd go through scripts together and chat.

In fact, that was with all the cast of Númenor because we were new arrivals. Everybody else had been there about a year when we arrived.  We had a little WhatsApp group called Númenor Knights, and we used to meet up for dinners at my place quite regularly. It was a good way to get to know each other and to mutually discover the world of Númenor, between the different bits of research that we'd all individually done and what we found was written on the page.

Elendil and Galadriel have an interesting relationship, especially given his historical affection for the elves and how he speaks Elvish. What interested you most about that part of him?

It's fascinating when you put Elendil and Galadriel together because for him, he grew up amongst the Faithful, and indeed, what JD and Patrick have created is that his wife was deeply immersed in that loyal world. So the history of Galadriel, you would be taught it at school as a young Númenórean. She's a like a rockstar, a historical global hero to meet.

That's one element that Elendil is playing with. But at the same time, there's a brilliant line from Patrick about how he sees his children in her eyes, two different aspects of his kids in her. Despite this whole mortality-immortality debate, despite the fact she's thousands of years old, he can still see that there's an immaturity in her, or there's even a willful disregard of how to work with people. I think that's the difference between elves and humans.

I also think that because of being mortal, it forces you to consider more deeply how to relate to folk, how to approach the world that you live in with this ticking clock. Because she doesn't have that, that gives her a different outlook. That was fascinating to try and put all of that into their initial meeting together.

They start out very antagonistic, but by the end of the episode, there's an almost begrudging respect between the two of them.

I think that's right. And indeed, from my perspective as Elendil, there's what I felt was a gradual drawing towards her, inexorably. He can't deny it. As much as he would like to be pragmatic and keep his family safe in the new Númenor, he's drawn towards her. That Elvish connection between them speaks. I think even him speaking in Elvish cements that quite quickly. It's an emotional language. It's potentially his mother tongue. And they can converse that way and deeply undertsand each other.

I think it's very Tolkienian. It's all over the Lord of the Rings books, where you suddenly see characters begin to understand that they have a fate, and although they might want to go off in a different direction, fate is pulling them in the opposite direction. I think he's not necessarily consciously feeling that with her yet, but it's definitely instinctive. He's drawn to her.

Let's talk about learning Elvish. I know you studied with experts and linguists who basically tutored you. What was that experience like?

It was great, actually. A couple of years ago I did a Bollywood film called The Thungs of Hindostan with Aamir Khan, and I had 36 scenes to do, which were all in Urdu. The director wanted my English character to be so good at speaking the language that he would be even more fearful as a member of the British East India Company, as a baddie, basically. I'd had this experience of being given words essentially as sounds and trying to make sense of them.

So being given the Elvish was another moment where I recognized this was a similar journey. And it's a joyful journey because you have to unpick language in a way that you try and relate to your own language. You work out where the vowel sounds are, what the conjunctions are, which words are important, what the rhythm is. Obviously, Tolkien being a philologist, it's very beautiful to say Elvish. It's quite joyful to get your tongue around.

It's such a beautiful language. I imagine it'd be pretty fun to speak that way.

It really was. Every time a script comes in and there's a bit of Elvish, my little heart jumps. My soul sings because I'm like, "Okay, good! I can get some more of that." [Laughs] There's this word "namárië" which I love, which I get to say later on. To get the chance as an actor to be the person who says it in the character of Elendil is pretty special.

There's a great sequence where Galadriel and Elendil ride on horseback to the Hall of Lore. What do you remember most about filming that?

That was my second shooting day. My first shooting day was in a helicopter up in an extraordinary mountain range, for a scene in episode 7, which was a bit of a shock. I was expecting to do them in order. I don't know why I thought that because you never shoot in order. But [horseback riding] was my second scene, and that was the first time we were establishing the physical geography of Númenor. Of course, in episode 3, we see this incredible set the production designers had built for the capital city, this mixture of ancient Rome, Greece, Marrakesh, Byzantium, Santorini, all of it. But riding the horses on the beach, you suddenly realize, "Oh wow, we've just put on film the physical geography of Númenor." That was joyful.

I'd had three and a half months of horse -iding lessons, three days a week. So, I really got to know my horse Trinko. Just to be let loose on that beach was very, very special. You can't quite believe your luck when you're there, riding a horse on the beach in New Zealand, chasing Galadriel — who you'll never catch up with.

It sounds like preparation was a full-time job. One day you're studying Elvish; the next day you're practicing your horseback riding. Never the same day twice.

Yeah, let alone all of the stunt training lessons and the sailing we talked about. There's a lot to learn, which is great for neuroplasticity because my brain is still developing. [Laughs]

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

For more from Lloyd Owen — as well as Entertainment Weekly's breakdown of each Rings of Power episode — listen to EW's new Lord of the Rings podcast, All Rings Considered.

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