The return to Middle-earth is nearly upon us, with The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim just around the corner!
Before the film’s release, Geeks of Color spoke with actors Gaia Wise and Laurence Ubong Williams, who portray Héra, the daughter of Helm, King of Rohan, and Fréaláf, Helm’s nephew (and Héra’s cousin), respectively.
The pair chatted about their reactions to learning they would participate in The War of the Rohirrim, tackling voice acting, adventuring with other characters from The Lord of the Rings and more.
Check out the full interview with Gaia Wise and Laurence Ubong Williams below:
Getting a role in something attached to the iconic The Lord of the Rings film franchise is undoubtedly an epic feeling. Wise and Ubong-Williams’s joy was apparent when they received the news that they’d been cast in The War of the Rohirrim.
“I screamed so loudly that my neighbours called the police. Two policemen knocked on the front door of my flat, and they went, ‘Are you alright?’ And I said, ‘I’ve just got a job.’ And they looked at me like I was insane. Hopefully, if they see the film, they’ll understand my excitement,” Wise shared.
“Yeah, not too dissimilar. I didn’t have the police come around, thankfully. But yes, elation, loud, strange noises, unprecedented in tone. But um, and then it all has to sink in, but it doesn’t really ever sink in. Even now, as we doing this and talking to your lovely self, it hasn’t all quite sunk in. You go through in and out phases like, ‘Okay, I’m a professional. I’ve got a job to do,’ but the same time, I’m geeking out because I’m a part of The Lord of the Rings,” Williams said.
Joining a film that is part of the much beloved The Lord of the Rings film franchise seems daunting. However, Wise and Williams were up to the challenge, including taking on voice acting for the first time.
“I loved it. I added new strings to my bow that I think will be invaluable to me moving forward. It’s a strange experience initially, because, yeah, I think as an actor you are, you are used to having other people around you that you can bounce things off of. Also, you’re used to having a massive crew around you, and this is, you know, you’re in a booth, and then about five people in another room, or towards the end, we’d all be in the same room, and we’d have the screen on. It’s daunting. I think you feel a bit awkward. And then I think once I got over that awkwardness and realized that actually this was fantastic, because I was just allowed to explore and experiment, and there was no right or wrong, and when it felt right, it felt really right, and the characters grew out of that,” Wise told us.
“Yeah, it was an incredibly new type of challenge, like just build a character from the ground up, using exclusively your voice. But challenges are always exciting, and I did find myself once you get to grips with like, okay, intimacy or big moments, like, how to do that in this kind of environment, once you grasp that and you start to navigate and understand, oh, that’s how I can achieve truth, or that’s how I can achieve like real like spectacle. I would love to do this again and again and again,” Williams shared.