The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is just around the corner and we have a lot of characters to learn about. Sauron is back with a new evil plan, the Stranger is on his way east and Queen Regent Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) will have a tough time ruling the island state of Númenor after she was blinded during a campaign in Middle Earth.
We were able to speak to Cynthia Addai-Robinson at San Diego Comic-Con, who told us about the challenges ahead for Míriel. “At the end of season one, when she was blindfolded, she was blindfolded for a while. And there was actually a brief moment where I had to really portray the blindness towards the end,” she said. “In season 2, it’s now fully the situation. And so I had to make sure that it still felt like she was finding her way, but it didn’t weaken her or make her look like she was stumbling around; this is a world that she knows very well. She has to exude strength… So that was a big challenge and very important for me. But I myself am excited to see where the element of blindness goes beyond what we presented in season 2.”
“When you’re missing one sense, your other senses are automatically heightened. So I often felt like it was really about listening to my fellow actors and feeling the energy shift in the room. We had some courtroom scenes and you could just feel people’s energy. And so you can imagine that in a real-life scenario, that’s probably how you figure out and use your other senses to understand what’s going on around you.”
Apparently Addai-Robinson made blindness look easy on set, at least according to co-stars like Trystan Gravelle, who plays Míriel’s ambitious adviser Pharazôn. “I was very impressed with how she handled it, because when you’re on set for the first time, the first few scenes you shoot, you look and think, ‘Is she following me? I got it.’ None of that was there. It was very good. So we kind of slipped into it. She’s an absolute professional. She’s got it. We can keep doing it.”
As we can see in the trailer, Míriel also has to deal with a much bigger outside threat: a giant sea monster. It’s not clear how she ends up in this situation, but Addai-Robinson said that “working with the water” was one of the two big challenges for her this season, along with Míriel’s blindness. “I think it’s kind of about facing a challenge and seeing who you are on the other side of that challenge,” she said of that mysterious scene.
“I was underwater and it was scary and I’m still here, so obviously I survived it. But every time I watch a film or a show and I see an actor underwater, I really understand how hard it actually is to achieve that. And I’m very proud and have to give credit to the whole water stunt team at Pinewood in London who basically create that illusion and make sure we do it safely and all that good stuff.”
Fans familiar with the works of JRR Tolkien know that the island of Númenor has a very dramatic future ahead of it. I don’t know how the sea monster is involved in this, but Gravelle hints that there are divisions in Númenorean society. “I think you’ll see that because of the schism in Númenor, to be honest, you’ll see two different kinds of grief and perspectives of grief and how that affects the rest of the island,” he hinted.
Finally, Addai-Robinson spoke a little about what it is like to be a person of color playing a prominent role in a fantasy world that is traditionally populated mainly by white people. There are several people of color in The Rings of Power cast, which led to some disappointing but predictable racist reactions from parts of the fanbase. Now that the show has endured and is returning with Season 2, hopefully that will subside.
“I think what I love about literature is that in your head it is exactly what you want it to be,” mused Addai-Robinson. “So you plug yourself into that world. I’ve never looked at anything and felt like it didn’t represent my world or look like that. And I think to get to this point where we’re now presenting this global series to a global audience, it would be almost weird if it didn’t represent the world. If Middle Earth is a representation of Earth, it stands to reason that here we are in the 2020s and we need to represent the world as it is. So I always think about myself as a kid reading books and just assuming that people look like me, or at least look like the people around me and the diversity around me… So that was just always assumed for me, and I guess sometimes it still surprises me that it could be different. So it was never something that particularly bothered me. And I’m glad that we’re just kind of moving forward now… We’re not going to go back to anything, or at least I don’t plan to.”
We will see what Addai-Robinson calls a “charged” Númenor story when The Rings of Power returns with season two next week on Thursday, August 28th on Prime Video.
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