Prime Video
For Benjamin Walker, the towering musical theater actor, landing the role of Gil-galad on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was a childhood dream come true.
According to Walker, the first “big-boy book” his older brother gave him to read was The Hobbit, and the two used to play their own version of The Lord of the Rings as kids running around the woods of Georgia, with Walker usually crawling around on his hands and knees as Gollum. Gil-galad, of course, is a far cry from Gollum. On the Amazon Prime Video prequel series, whose first season cost a record $465 million to produce, his is the last High King of the Noldor, a prominent division of elves. His exploits are described in The Silmarillion, a collection of short stories by J.R.R. Tolkien set in the world of The Lord of Rings that forms the basis of The Rings of Power. On the show, Gil-galad’s elven people are enjoying a time of peace—though Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), “the mightiest and fairest” of the elves, is on the hunt for Sauron and his dark army of orcs.
It is, at 40 years of age, the biggest project of Walker’s career—one that’s seen him play Andrew Jackson and Patrick Bateman on Broadway, as well as the villain Erik Gelden in Jessica Jones and the titular slayer in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And Walker, who is married to the actress Kaya Scodelario, had a blast filming the sprawling series in New Zealand.