Lloyd Owen reveals the characteristics that make a role irresistible as he reprises his role as Elendil in Amazon Prime’s The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power, and prepares to take to the stage in an exciting new political drama
Lloyd Owen can clearly recall the day he learnt that he had been given the role of Elendil in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It had been a long casting process, spanning many months, and had involved what Lloyd describes as an excruciatingly hilarious long-distance chemistry read, where a satellite delay ensured it was “impossible to get any chemistry” at all. Anticipating bad news, he had asked his agent, Roger Charteris, to spare them both an uncomfortable phone call and email him with the outcome instead. “So, I got an email from him the next day,” Lloyd explains, “saying, ‘You asked me to email you any news of Lord of the Rings…’ I had to keep scrolling down the email to see the end of the sentence, and I thought, OK, well I haven’t got that one then. But at the bottom, he’d written, ‘and good things come to those who wait’, with a little smiley face emoji. He got me good and proper!”
“There were a lot of really good CREATIVE discussions to try to bring him to life… The great JOY was to be able to shape this CHARACTER, and watch how he can finally become a KING, and be the LEADER”
Lloyd wears: wool trousers in dark grey by Connolly; white t-shirt by Rise & Fall; jacket by Edward Sexton
It was incredible news for Lloyd, a long-time fan of Tolkien, who recalls The Hobbit being one of the first proper books he read independently. “I was given the paperback, with that beautiful drawing that Tolkien had drawn himself on the front cover… it was a very formative experience, and I absolutely loved it. My imagination was fired.” He went on to read The Lord of the Rings and he read The Hobbit again, many years later to his son, as well as watching all of the films. “You think you might know stuff about Tolkien, but then when you really dive into it, you know, it is endless what you can learn,” he tells me. “It’s great fun, it’s been a joy to dive into this project, because I knew nothing about the Second Age. So, it was very special. Very special.”
Telling the story of the thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-loved books, Amazon Prime’s highly acclaimed epic fantasy series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has just returned for season two, with Lloyd reprising his role as Captain Elendil. A sea captain and son of the last lord of Andúnië on the island of Númenor, the character has a huge part to play in Middle-earth’s history as the eventual King of Gondor who is responsible for defeating Sauron and taking the One Ring for himself before dying a hero’s death. Was there a sense of responsibility playing such a fabled character, I ask? “There’s that great phrase, pressure is a privilege. I definitely feel very privileged to be able to have this chance to play Elendil,” Lloyd tells me. “He is a famous character in the legendarium, he is this sort of hero archetype for the Tolkien fans. People really love him – based on very little information, actually. He only says one line of dialogue in all of Tolkien’s writing, and yet he has this really powerful legacy.”
This sense of mystery made the process of character development particularly interesting. “How do you personify this man, how do you make him a three-dimensional, fully rounded, fallible human being? I mean, that was my challenge, along with the writers – that’s what we discussed a lot,” Lloyd reveals. “There were a lot of really good creative discussions to try to bring him to life. You know, what is the hero archetype, what is a leader? The great joy was to be able to shape this character, and watch how he can finally become a King, and be the leader of The Last Alliance of Elves and Men.”
What can he tell us about his character’s arc in this series? “Well, as we left Númenor in season one, they’ve just been to war, they’ve lost the battle, and the Queen’s father, the King has just died,” Lloyd recaps. “Númenor has been on the precipice of civil war, anyway, and you know, that defeat just makes this schism in society even stronger and more delicate, and more fragile, and more likely to crack. Coming back from the war, it looks like Elendil’s son Isildur is dead, and his daughter Eärien blames the Queen for the decision that she made to go to war, and we find that Elendil, you know, he just can’t react emotionally to any of it. And so that causes a bit of a split between him and his daughter, which is taken advantage of, shall we say, by Ar-Pharazôn, and that creates a Númenorean divide between those that are loyal and faithful to the elves, like Elendil, and Ar-Pharazôn, who is a bit more nationalistic. So, there’s this great storyline of Elendil’s familial, parental responsibility – his love for family and his love for nation. And then he ends up being put in an impossible position, where he has to either renounce his faith to stay alive or die for his faith; it’s powerful stuff for him. Númenor has a long story to develop over the coming seasons, and it really starts here. I’m excited for folk to see it.”
He has, in fact, already had an insight into what the reaction will be. In July, Lloyd, along with other cast members and showrunners, was at
Comic-Con in San Diego to reveal the season trailer to fans and answer their questions. “You know, people queued for 24 hours to get into Hall H to come and see our show,” he exclaims. “I’ve done a lot of theatre in my life, and that’s so immediate, and that’s what one misses with film and television – you make it in a bit of a vacuum. And now and again, when it goes out, probably six months to a year later, you might bump into the odd person on the street who says, ‘Oh I love that show’. But having fans en-masse who have seen it, that’s the closest you’re going to get to a theatrical sort of moment, because there’s lots of them, and they’ve all been affected by it. And you feel that, and it’s a very, very nice feeling being around them all. And also, top of tops, someone came dressed as Elendil; that was my first Númenorean Elendil impersonator – I was delighted to meet them.”
Lloyd’s previous screen work is vast and varied, including being cast as William Heelis, husband of Renée Zellweger’s beloved author Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter, and as Ripley in Viva Laughlin for CBS alongside Hugh Jackman. He has also appeared in the NBC/Sky production of You, Me and the Apocalypse with Rob Lowe, and in the hugely popular BBC series Monarch of the Glen. And he has a long and highly respected international career in theatre, too, encompassing leading roles at the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Donmar Warehouse, Almeida and the Young Vic. So, what does he look for in a role? “That’s a very good question…” he replies, thoughtfully. “If I think of Elendil, and then when I played Brutus at the Young Vic, that would be an immediate parallel of the divided man. There being as much of an internal conflict as possible, I think is an attraction, but in essence it’s just whether there is something that I recognise about the existential struggle of what it is to be human. Not necessarily that it is my experience of life, but where I recognise interactions and feelings, and if that is there in the role, and the writer has been able to just help me suspend my disbelief all the way through, then I think, yeah, I would love to tell this story, and play this particular character.”
Above: Lloyd wears, opposite page: herringbone wool double breasted coat by Connolly; single breasted pinstripe wool suit and cotton shirt by Brunello Cucinelli; vintage tie from armoíre by O’Dell’s studios; socks by London Sock Company; and shoes by Crockett & Jones. Below: Lloyd wears: single breasted pinstripe wool suit and cotton shirt by Brunello Cucinelli; and vintage tie from armoíre by O’Dell’s Studios,
Are there any particular roles he has not yet played that he dreams of taking on, I ask. “I’ve always wanted to play Macbeth, so that’s one,” he reveals. “That’s on the list, theatre-wise, for sure. There’s a couple that have passed me by because of age, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, playing Brick, but I am probably about right for Big Daddy now. And one of my early theatre jobs was Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Diana Rigg and David Suchet, directed by Howard Davies. I was so lucky, because it was one of my set texts for A level and I absolutely love that play, and Edward Albee was in rehearsals with us, which was just a dream come true. You know, we got to spend some time together, and on my opening night card, he wrote, ‘To a definitive Nick, from a definitive Edward, and now onto George…’. So that’s always been one that’s been in the background since Edward said I should maybe take on George in the play one day. I think I’m still maybe a tiny bit young… maybe… but I’m coming up for it, anytime now!”
Notably, these ambitions all revolve around theatre, is this Lloyd’s preferred medium? “I mean look, variation is the spice of life, the heat of life,” he is quick to point out. “I think, theatre-wise, the appeal is the immediacy we talked about earlier. The idea that an audience and a group of actors create an evening together, each night. So, it’s new every time, and it’s a collective effort to make something special. And that immediacy is very addictive, and that’s the thing I grew up with, and that’s the thing I always wanted to do. And that’s really hard to replicate in film, as I said, because you do it in a bit of a vacuum. A sort of wonderful moment can happen between a director and a couple of actors, and then we all know we’ve got something special, but there’s no audience there to witness it, so it is less immediate. But the great thing about that is, when you do get it right once on celluloid or on film, then it’s there forever. So that’s what’s really enticing about it – some of those wonderful movie performances are still there to be seen. And theatre is ephemeral, so you don’t get that.”
“There being an internal CONFLICT, I think, is an ATTRACTION, but in essence it’s whether there is something that I RECOGNISE about the existential STRUGGLE of what it is to be HUMAN”
cotton jersey polo shirt in charcoal grey by Brunello Cucinelli; wool trousers in dark grey by Connolly; Star Legacy Moonphase watch by Montblanc; and vintage Armani jacket from armoíre by O’Dell’s studios
Living by that adage about variety being the spice of life, after The Rings of Power, Lloyd will be seen next on stage. “I’m about to do a new David Edgar play at the Royal Shakespeare Company actually,” he reveals. “It’s called The New Real, and it’s a brilliant play; I did a couple of workshops for it last year. David has written a play about the political strategists from the US who went over to Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Set in the early 2000s in a faraway country, the play tells the story of Rachel, a stellar American political strategist, and Caro, her British data whizz, who have been hired to fight a ferocious election, in a place where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake. They think they’re there to teach the Eastern Europeans how to do democracy, but it turns out they’re there to learn. And when Rachel’s former political partner Larry (played by Lloyd) rocks up on the rival side, their showdown threatens to change global politics forever.
“My character is based on a guy called Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s political advisor in 2016,” Lloyd explains. “He went to jail recently, although Trump did pardon him after a few months. But yeah, it’s a really juicy project and David is one of our great writers, and he never patronises. It’s a bit like The West Wing onstage, you’ve got to really keep up. So hopefully we can translate his big brain into a very engaging evening of theatre. I’m really looking forward to it –we’re going to be doing that at the RSC’s The Other Place in Stratford, in October.” The performance run will also give Lloyd an opportunity to spend some time at home in London, a city he loves. “I am a Londoner, I grew up in north London, and then moved to Battersea for about 25 years when I got married. And I finally managed to get back up to north London in about 2014,” he tells me. “I know us north Londoners are really boring about how marvellous north London is, but it really is! I’ve lived in Los Angeles for three years, and I’ve toured a lot in my life, but there’s something about this city which is extraordinary. It is a proper melting pot. I mean, they say New York is cosmopolitan, but it is nothing like the UK.
I think Samuel Johnson said that if you are tired of London, you are tired of life, and I think that is absolutely true. There’s so much to grab hold of. It’s hard, it’s tough, it will challenge you, it is in your face, but if you embrace it, there’s so much to find. I’m a huge fan, I don’t think there is any greater city.” Except, perhaps, Andúnië.
