‘I seem to have this uncanny vibe about me’: actor Morfydd Clark on her eerie roles

There’s something mysterious about Morfydd Clark, the 35-year-old Welsh actor: it’s there in her performances, for sure, and in person, too. With her pale, almost translucent skin and watery blue eyes, she has become the go-to for directors wanting ethereal. Otherworldly. It’s why she’s perfect as the elvish leader Galadriel in Prime Video’s prequel, The Rings of Power a part played in the Lord of the Rings films by Cate Blanchett. She has also found herself in demand in the horror genre, following her breakthrough performance as a pious, uptight nurse in 2019 indie film Saint Maud, which led to a Bafta Rising Star nomination.

Clark, though, sees it differently. “It’s quite humbling to continually be cast as someone who is really freaky,” she says in her sing-song burr when we meet for an orange juice on a sweltering afternoon at a London pub. “I didn’t know that’s what I was giving off. And almost everything where I have a kiss in it, it’s like, ‘It’s a really sad kiss.’ But it’s interesting that I seem to have this slightly creepy, uncanny vibe about me that works in those type of things.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t upsides to having a reputation for being good at evoking weird. “Those characters are soooo fun,” says Clark, almost gleefully. “I feel really lucky that I’ve been able to play not just creepy but kind of gross female characters as well. Maud is really quite icky and also does pretty strange things, but you feel so free when you’re doing it.”

For what it’s worth, Clark, who today wears a vintage black dress with puffed sleeves, her hair its natural auburn rather than Galadriel’s eye-popping platinum, isn’t really freaky or creepy. She’s maybe a bit eccentric, but in the best possible way. I arrive with a long list of questions and, when we part 90 minutes later, I’ve asked hardly any of them. Clark is funny, curious, always steering the conversation in unexpected directions. At one point, we have an involved discussion about whether it would be easier to tame a fox or a hare.

And Clark happens to be extraordinary at what she does. The Rings of Power, said to be the most expensive TV series ever made, has been a massive global hit, becoming the most watched original Prime Video show ever. It returns for a second season this month with an extra sprinkling of Sauron. Clark, in fact, is going to be hard to avoid these next few weeks. She also stars with Matt Smith in a new film, the unnerving Starve Acre, another psychological thriller, about a couple whose life in 1970s Yorkshire is upended when their young son starts behaving strangely. Add to that, Clark is the lead in a pair of plays simultaneously – John Osborne’s radical Look Back in Anger, and Roots by Arnold Wesker – at the Almeida Theatre, London, from which she has ducked out of rehearsals to meet me.

But when I suggest that, career-wise, things couldn’t be going much better, she wrinkles her nose. “It still feels very surreal,” Clark replies. “It’s a weird thing about being in your 30s as well. You obviously are always still developing as an actor, but you’re a bit like, ‘Oh, it happened. I guess I’m here now.’” Did Clark ever doubt that? “Yes, regularly,” she snorts. “Weekly, possibly. Still now, really. That’s just part of being an actor. No, I’m deeply neurotic and think it’s going to end tomorrow.”

Clark – whose first name is pronounced “Morfyth” – was born in Sweden to a Glaswegian dad and a mum from north Wales who met when they sang in the same choir. He worked in software, the job that took them to Scandinavia, and she was a paediatrician. When their daughter was two, the family moved back to the UK, settling in the seaside town of Penarth, near Cardiff. Clark, however, developed a lifelong love of anarchic characters from Swedish children’s books: Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, mischief-maker Emil of Lönneberga and Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter.

“I feel so lucky that I was brought up on Swedish literature, because I think they like children a bit more than Britain,” she says. “They are allowed to be naughty. But also, I feel there’s a respect from the adults for the sacredness of childhood. I found school here quite stifling while my imaginary world was a free one.”

Aged seven, Clark was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and put on pills to level out her behaviour. “Looking back now, I didn’t really understand it and thought it was naughty medication,” she says. “Because I remember there was somebody in the year above me, who actually had an illness that I didn’t know about, and used to get a lot of tablets. Every lunchtime we’d go and get our tablets and I remember thinking, ‘I’m quite naughty, and I get one; he must be really naughty.”

Clark attended Welsh-language school and struggled with the discipline: “Often I’d go in and the first thing I’d say would be in English, so immediately I’d be in detention, like, ‘Damn!’” When she was 16, she decided to leave. After Clark spent a month moping about in her pyjamas, her mother suggested she pursue acting or singing, which she had done on and off, never especially seriously, throughout her childhood. “Actually my mum, once, years after I’d graduated, said, ‘Oh we were so glad you went to drama school and didn’t try to go to university because you’d have crashed and burned.’ I was like, ‘OK! Thank you for keeping that from me!’”

It turned out to be a decent shout. Clark auditioned for the National Youth Theatre, National Youth Theatre of Wales and the Welsh National Youth Opera and won places at all of them. She started at the last, where Tim Rhys-Evans, the director of music, told her that while her singing was strong, she’d be an even better actor. She took his advice and earned a spot on the three-year acting course at the prestigious Drama Centre London.

“I was suddenly in a situation where I wasn’t in trouble all the time,” Clark recalls. “It’s short bursts of activity. Lots of variation. Lots of deadlines. And I’m quite good at working under those type of pressures. If I had a project that was a year, I’d be dreadful. Whereas if it’s like, ‘I’m on stage next week, I need to do all this work,’ that’s fine.

“I’m lucky to be in a career where eccentricity is like, ‘Oh, cool,’” Clark goes on. “I feel you’re allowed to be eccentric if you’re an artist or an aristocrat. And it should be open to all. We should all be allowed to be more eccentric!”

Clark worked steadily through her 20s, both on screen and in theatre, including roles as Sister Clara in the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (another of her favourite books) and as David Copperfield’s fiancée and his mother in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield in 2019. Her plan B, if acting didn’t work out – she states this like it’s a no-brainer – was to become a midwife. “Obviously you need to be a competent midwife in terms of the science,” she accepts. “But also there’s an element of acting and personality-shifting to be whatever is right for the person giving birth.

“I’ve watched every One Born Every Minute,” Clark continues, referring to the Channel 4 documentary series set in a labour ward. “I think it’s the greatest acting exercise ever. The medics are constantly acting and it’s quite fascinating what they’re doing. Also the dads try not to show how terrified they are. And then the intense truth of the mothers. Just so dramatic.”

This unusual prep perhaps paid off with Saint Maud, in which she plays a palliative nurse assigned to care for a tricksy 49-year-old dancer and choreographer (Jennifer Ehle) with cancer. The film was the debut of the British writer and director Rose Glass and Clark had to endure three auditions – during one of which she crouched in a corner, vomiting and convulsing – to land the part. “The script tuned into lots of my personal obsessions,” says Clark. “I was like, ‘I need to be around this woman who’s written this. I need to know Rose Glass because she’s thinking about loads of the same things.’”

Saint Maud was offbeat but landed with audiences – director Danny Boyle called it “striking, affecting and mordantly funny” – and ended up being nominated for two Baftas in 2021. “When it went to the Toronto film festival, me and Rose cried the whole time,” recalls Clark. “We were just overwhelmed. I’d never been the lead and she’d never done a film. Then it got these reviews that were like ‘Whaaat?’ Both of us were in a state of complete shock for the whole thing.”

From Saint Maud, Clark was approached about a new Amazon TV project. The tech company had acquired the rights for a Lord of the Rings prequel from the Tolkien estate, promising a commitment of five seasons and a $1bn production spend, but the show was so secretive that she was not even told what it was. Then, even when Clark knew she had landed the job as one of the elves, she was flown to New Zealand in October 2019 not knowing exactly which character she would be playing. It was Galadriel, and she ended up spending almost two years over there, in part because of the ambition of the series, but also because of the Covid pandemic.

“Nothing will ever compare to shooting that first season in New Zealand,” says Clark, who usually lives in south London. “We were flying up to mountains that you could only get to on a helicopter to shoot. But it was very far away from home. And I was very homesick. I also work with my sister a lot and I’m really close with her.”

Clark’s younger sister Siwan is an Oxford University graduate, who has been a teacher and researcher, and their collaboration is an unusual, intense one. “Siwan has been part of making all my characters, we are like a little duo together,” explains Clark. “So much of being an actor is thinking and talking and she’s the best person to think and talk to. It’s the biggest blessing of my career, probably, being able to work with her.”

Another key member of the team is Matty, a toy poodle-bichon cross. “She’s my timetable enforcer,” Clark says, earnestly. “Because you have to take her out in the morning. In my 20s, there was a point where I was like, ‘I’m in chaos…’ And not necessarily bad chaos. But I was like, ‘There is no order to my life at all.’ And then I got a dog because it was, ‘I have to walk her.’”

Not too much walking, though. “I did my research very carefully,” says Clark. “The bichon is a very lazy breed of dog. One of the reasons they were made was to keep captains on boats company. There were lots of suicides because they couldn’t be friends with people below their rank and they were so lonely. And that’s why there are loads of bichons in old paintings…”

Clark trails off, starting to doubt her facts. “I might just have seen one TikTok on this,” she accepts. “But I like that version. So it’s quite a macho dog actually. A captain’s dog.”

When we meet, Clark has just returned from the San Diego Comic-Con, where the trailer for the second season of the Rings of Power – which was shot less excitingly, but more conveniently, in the UK – has been unveiled to positive online murmurs. The secrecy is less intense around the show now, but the cast are all still assiduously briefed on not letting too much slip about what’s coming. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been working for the government,” says Clark. “And generally I spoil everything. Like if we’re discussing a film, I’ll accidentally spoil it. Also you do want to keep it all secret, because you want it to be a surprise. But the fear of spoiling is so immense and so stressful. And ultimately when you’re out there doing press, you’re just a person with a mouth.”

Starve Acre, meanwhile, was at the other end of the scale in terms of budget. It was shot in winter in rural Yorkshire and, despite its stars being on two of TV’s glitziest fantasy shows (Matt Smith is a regular on House of the Dragon), there were pretty much zero frills. “Our green room was two chairs next to two massive fridges filled with loads and loads of milk,” says Clark. “So we spent quite a lot of time being, ‘Here we are! May as well make the most of it!’ But it was really lovely for me on that job to be around someone so funny and silly. Matt takes the work seriously, but not himself.”

The same could be said for Clark. She is quietly building an all-killer and varied acting CV: that reputation is likely to grow with the long-awaited release, probably next year, of a film version of Hamlet, in which she plays Ophelia opposite Riz Ahmed. “He’s such an incredible Hamlet,” says Clark. “I think because he’s a musician and a rapper, as well as being an incredible actor: I’m very familiar with Hamlet and yet hearing him do it, I felt like I didn’t know anything about it.”

Until then, Clark has the short-term goals of recovering from jetlag and preparing these two plays at the Almeida. And, she hopes, not putting her foot in it too much when she does interviews. “Lots of actors are slightly introverted, odd people who pretend to be other people,” she says. “And then doing press it’s like, ‘What? I’ve got to go out and be charming and interesting? I like playing other characters because I don’t think that’s my forte!’” She sighs. “So it’s a journey and hopefully I’m improving.”

Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is on Prime Video from 29 August. Starve Acre is in cinemas from 6 September. Roots runs at the Almeida Theatre from 10 September to 23 November, Look Back in Anger from 20 September to 23 November (almeida.co.uk)

Styling by Pia Aung; photographer’s assistant Tom Frimley; style assistant Jenson Kay Polley; tailor Eleanor Williams; hair by Stefan Bertin at The Wall Group using Hair by Sam McKnight; makeup by Lucy Patchett using Lisa Eldridge