Blanchett Tackles New Queen
Staff Reporter

Cate Blanchett, who received an Oscar nomination for playing Elizabeth, told SCI FI Wire that it's a completely different thing playing the queen of the elves in the upcoming Lord of the Rings film trilogy. "Oh, the queen of the elves was a very different queen [from] Elizabeth. You'll see," Blanchett said during a press briefing for her upcoming supernatural thriller, The Gift. Blanchett plays Galadriel in Peter Jackson's upcoming movies, which are based on J.R.R. Tolkien's three novels of the same name.

"It was uncharted territory for me," Blanchett said. "I've never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. ... Filming The Lord of the Rings was like stepping into a video game for me. It was another world. ... I basically did it so I could have the [elf] ears. I loved the ears. And they were so sweet. They actually made little bronze castings of my ears for me to take. Which was great. I loved all of that stuff. ... And filmmaking is, no matter what genre you're working in, ... creating fantasy for an audience."

Blanchett, an Australian who has mastered American accents for her various films, said it was an entirely new challenge developing an elvish accent for Rings. "Elves do not exist," she said. "So how does an elf speak? And Tolkien wrote a language. He wrote elvish. And there are, to my astonishment, ... elvish experts, people who speak fluent elvish. And ... I actually speak elvish in the thing. It's beautiful. It's sort of like Welsh and a very sort of melange of various Celtic languages. That was fantastic too."