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Lord of the Rings: Cate Blanchett Wanted To Play Surprising Second Character
No other actress could have embodied the role of Galadriel as Cate Blanchett did in the 2000s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the Australian actress pitched a second role to director Peter Jackson. Blanchett dominated all of her scenes in the early 2000s films, aided by her ethereal beauty, which asserted it was the role she was born to play. The success of The Lord of The Rings, which collectively won a whopping 17 Academy Awards, rocketed her to superstardom. The actress has gone on to star in other blockbuster hits, as the wicked stepmother in the 2015 live-action remake of Cinderella and Hela in 2017's Thor: Ragnarok. Blanchett has remained a mainstay in Hollywood for over two decades.
Blanchett rose to international attention after her role as Elizabeth I in 1998’s Elizabeth. She starred in countless critically acclaimed films like Carol, alongside Rooney Mara. She returned to Middle Earth and reprised the role of Galadriel for The Hobbit trilogy. Blanchett is known to play strong female characters. She has won two Academy Awards, one for Best Actress in 2013 for her role as a fallen-from-grace socialite in Blue Jasmine, and her historic Best Supporting Actress win in 2004’s The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Blanchett is the only actress to have won an Oscar portraying an Academy-Award winning actress, in the role of Katherine Hepburn.
During Blanchett’s recent interview on WTF with Marc Maron, she revealed that she proposed a second appearance in The Lord of The Rings to director Peter Jackson in an attempt to up the lacking female energy. Blanchett said, “I did say to Peter and Fran, they were doing a banquet scene with a whole lot of dwarves. I always wanted to play the bearded lady, so I asked them, ‘Could I be your hairy wife woman when you pan across the banquet table of dwarves?'” Had everything panned out, it would make an incredible Easter egg, but the shooting schedule didn’t line up.
Amazon plans to produce a Lord of the Rings prequel series, drawing information from other Tolkien texts like The Silmarillion. Blanchett, unlike some of her other co-stars, like Orlando Bloom and John Rhys-Davies, has yet to comment on the return to Middle Earth. It is unclear if Galadriel will appear in the new series. For now, the world will remain blessed with Blanchett’s portrayal of the powerful elven queen of Lothlórien.
It’s delightful that almost two decades since its premiere, details still emerge about the epic shoot of the previously dubbed “unfilmable series.” Blanchett’s suggestion to Jackson came as a solution to the few women characters present in the world of Middle Earth. Tolkien famously wrote The Lord of the Rings after his defining experiences in World War I, fighting for England in the trenches, a masculine space. Between his own life and the time of publication, the lack of female representation in the series is unsurprising. It’s encouraging that Blanchett tried even in the early 2000s to remedy the lack of feminine energy by throwing on a beard and playing a dwarf.
