"Thranduil is different. He is the father of Legolas and he resides in Mirkwood, which is a pretty dangerous place. The Elves of Mirkwood are described in the book as ‘less wise and more dangerous’ than other Elves—not less wise as in stupid, but perhaps more reckless, which adds to their danger. They’re more shut off from the rest of the world.
Thranduil is a High Elf, so he is actually very similar to Galadriel and Elrond, the other Elf Lords that we meet in The Hobbit films. But he’s different. The difference being—and here’s an interesting piece of trivia—he fought in The Last Alliance, the battle that opens The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the battle that you see Elrond fighting, when Isildur takes the Ring from Sauron. We know from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings that Thranduil was part of that. He’s very much a part of this world. But after The Last Alliance and the fall of Sauron, he didn’t leave Middle-earth, he stayed in Middle-earth and became the Elvenking, over a race of other Elves called Silvan Elves. They’re the Wood-elves of Mirkwood, which was called The Greenwood at that time.
What’s interesting about that is there is a kind hierarchy among the Elves of Mirkwood. There are the High Elves, which are Thranduil and Legolas, and then there are the more lowly, more earthy Elves, the Silvan Elves. Tauriel is a Silvan Elf. She’s very much an Elf of Middle-earth, whereas the High Elves have come from somewhere else across the seas, and they are slightly more ethereal.
Thranduil was a very hard character to cast. He’s the father of Legolas, so he’s got to be a fairly beautiful-looking Elf. We also needed the stillness, grace and sense of power that Elves possess, that sense of having lived a long time in the world, and of being separate from the other races. There’s always that distance between the Elves and the other races. Not so much with Legolas and Tauriel, because they engage with the world, but there is a sense with Elves such as Thranduil that they are separate from the goings on in the rest of the world.
When we meet him, Thranduil has already made the decision many years ago to isolate his people to protect them; to not engage with the rest of the world or the rise and fall of the fortunes of other races outside his borders. He has shut himself off. This is how he lives. To do this, he has created quite a strict, closed-off world around himself. His rule is law.
We needed to find an actor who could play this character with that sense of iciness, dispassion and ruthlessness. But we also knew that he’s not evil. He’s ultimately still good.
It was very hard to find someone who can bring all that status to the character that Thranduil requires, but yet still engage the audience, still be interesting and able to draw us into his world, how he’s thinking and what he’s feeling. He’s sympathetic in a strange way.
That was a very difficult role to cast. On the way back from England on our casting trip in 2010, we stopped in New York for one reason and one reason only, and that was to meet with Lee Pace. He was the only person we were meeting with in New York at that time. We met with him and by the time he left, we knew we’d found Thranduil.”
Philippa Boyens on Thranduil qa
Dear Philippa Boyens you have my endless gratitude too.
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