“Poppy just sounded like so much fun which she is.”
There are no hobbits inThe Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Tolkien’soriginal halflings even existed.
Poppy (Megan Richards) and Nori (Markella Kavenagh) are two curious harfoots on ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’.Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
EW sat down with Richards recently forourAll Rings Consideredpodcastto break down the first few episodes.
What excited you most about them?
MEGAN RICHARDS:Oh, so much.
They were talking to me about Poppy and her history and the history of the harfoots.
I just remember hearing that it was such an incredible concept.
The thing that stuck with me the most was the camouflaging and their survival skills.
I remember thinking, I’m really intrigued to see how that’s going to be put into practice.
But there was something that really drew me in about it.
Poppy just sounded like so much fun which she is.
It was really exciting from the get-go, but it’s difficult to describe the harfoots.
It’s much easier to have a visual.
It wasn’t until all the pieces actually came together at the end that I was like,Aha!
How did that detail affect your understanding of her?
It created a whole level of depth.
So it was actually very helpful, preparation-wise.
And that, ultimately, comes from the loss she’s experienced before.
I remember when we watched it as a cast, we watched episodes 1, 2, and 3.
Now, she’s pulling the cart by herself!
Oh my goodness!"
I forget that people haven’t seen that.
She is pulling it by herself, among all those families together.
So, it definitely gave me a deeper level of understanding Poppy.
How did you want to figure out that dynamic and approach that friendship on screen?
We did a lot of hanging out and getting to know each other, which was very easy.
It was very nice to go have dinner and call it work.
[Laughs] We had a lot of workshops with JD, Patrick and [director J.A.
Bayona], before we even approached scripts.
It was all about their backstory and how they are with each other.
So yeah, we just kind of kept building, and we’re still building it.
I love some ofthe detail in the production designand costume design.
I think I just walked into a room and everyone else did things around me.
[Laughs] I mean, that’s literally all that I did.
I just kind of stood there.
The headpieces were from the costume department.
I did my costume fitting first, before hair and makeup.
Poppy also has a spoon on her belt, and I remember that wasn’t there originally.
[Costume designer] Kate Hawley just went, “We need something.
Nothing that’s too shiny because she wouldn’t have anything shiny, but something.”
Someone who was in the room was like, “We’ve got this spoon here.
Should we just…?”
And she was like, “Yeah, try it on!”
And that was it.
There are several great scenes with you, Markella as Nori, and Daniel Weyman as the Stranger.
How do you film those, where you and Markella are supposed to be half his size?
I remember seeing them being edited at the same time they were being filmed.
And I was just flabbergasted because I didn’t understand how they were doing it.
So that was one way of doing it, which was pretty incredible.
We also had wonderful scale doubles, who we created really close relationships with.
A lot of it just depended on what the scene is.
But we also had scale sets, too.
We had two sizes of the boulder that the Stranger is lying on in the crater.
One was to scale for Markella, and one was to scale for Daniel.
So the shot depends on which boulder is used.
It’s honestly amazing.
It’s an extra element.
So I feel very connected to those two specifically.
What do you remember most about filming with him?
I remember feeling incredibly stressed.
That was the first scene the showrunners had written that was sort of comedic.
Like, you knew that it was a comedic scene.
So immediately, I went, okay, I have to get this right.
So I was a bit stressed!
But it was great.
Obviously, Lenny was great to work with, and we had fun in the end.
And it’s fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
