Ismael Cruz Córdova’s journey from Puerto Rico to Middle Earth

“Every time I put the ears on, my posture would change: I’d stand up tall, my gaze would lower, my voice would deepen immediately,” says Ismael Cruz Córdova, drawing himself up and assuming an expression of dignified intensity. “It didn’t matter if it was a 2am call time, it was like a muscle memory thing.”

It’s the day of the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power UK premiere and Córdova, who hails from Puerto Rico and plays Arondir in the series, is enthusing about the transformative power of his prosthetic elf ears. “Carly Marr was in charge of the prosthetics and they were seamless,” he says. “They did a face cast and built them anatomically so that they follow a line of your bone structure and are correct for your face – as if you were born with them… When I put the costume on, I was like, ‘That’s the elf that I dreamt about.’”

In The Rings of Power, which is based on the footnotes of The Lord of the Rings (sidenote: imagine your book being so good that five, eight-episode series can be produced from just its footnotes) and is set approximately 2,000 years before the books that Peter Jackson’s original trilogy was based upon. Arondir is a Silvan elf who has been tasked with watching over the people (actual men-men) of the Southlands, who had sided with the Satan-like figure Morgoth (Sauron’s boss) in a war that occurred many centuries before. Unlike the rest of his kin, Arondir has a certain fondness for these people. He’s curious about them, empathetic – he even gets the hots for one of them, a foxy healer called Bronwyn (the sexual tension between the two is possibly the most intense thing in the show).

Like many of us who grew up reading the Lord of the Rings books or enjoying Peter Jackson’s films, Córdova dreamed of being an elf. But, living in Puerto Rico and being of Afro-Latino heritage, it’s a dream he never thought would come true. Born in Aguas Buenas, Córdova was raised in the mountains of Puerto Rico and describes his upbringing as “very poor” and “very rough”; several of the houses he was raised in had dirt floors, he says, and his family was “highly illiterate” – the only had one book in the house and that was the Bible.

Córdova’s relationship with Tolkien started young. He remembers the films coming out when he was 14 and taking whatever work he could – washing cars, cutting lawns – to save money so he could buy the DVDs. He describes watching them as “a transformative experience”. “I was literally mindblown,” he says. “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It’s so adventurous, so exciting, so sublime. But the behind-the-scenes [extras] were equally impactful for me, because that’s where I saw that it was also a life you could have – you can make these things real and also have a profession. I started saying ‘I’m going to be an elf’ to everyone, but they were like, ‘No you’re not, they don’t look like you.’ They struck down my dream.”

Fast-forward to 2019 and Córdova is an actor who has enjoyed a moderate amount of success: he’s had roles on the Showtime series Ray Donovan and in the third season of Berlin Station, as well as in Mary Queen of Scots alongside Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie. At the time, he was in New York filming HBO series The Undoing when he got a call about “an untitled Amazon project”. Then someone let slip it was for a Lord of the Rings spin-off series, and a once a faraway dream moved tantalisingly within reach. He auditioned for “an Aragorn-type”, “a brooding sort of human”, and had a callback. But, several weeks later, when he was shooting a movie in the South African desert, he found out that he hadn’t got it. Taking the initiative, he contacted the main casting director, Theo Park, who agreed to see him again; he sent a video through but again, was faced with a no.

“I started saying, ‘I’m going to be an elf’ to everyone, but they were like, ‘No you’re not, they don’t look like you.’ They struck down my dream” – Ismael Cruz Córdova

Refusing to give up, he even considered flying to Barcelona to meet one of the series’ directors, JA Bayona, to ask him to give him a shot. His team succeeded in dissuading him, though, which is when he finally began to feel like this might not happen for him. Then, one week later, he was invited to New Zealand for a screen test and bagged a role. “The night before, they said, ‘By the way, you’re playing an elf,’” he remembers. “And that’s the first time that I knew, 12 hours before. I was like, ‘no fucking way’.”

If this isn’t a lesson in persistence, I don’t know what is. Córdova had finally achieved his dream of becoming a Middle Earth elf – and the first Black, first Afro-Latino elf to appear on screen.

“The Lord of the Rings was one of the movies that made me actually quite fiery about representation in media,” he says. “[I understood] there was a mission for me; there was a place and a purpose for me in life, in terms of bringing a voice and proving that we can have that kind of mobility. Especially in the fantasy world – only recently has the fantasy world started opening its doors to ethnic and racial diversity. So that was a guiding star for me. But then, I’m sure you’ve seen the backlash. There have been so many loud, despicable voices.”

When the first visuals from the new series were revealed, including images of Córdova as an elf and Sophia Nomvete, who is Black, as a dwarf, there was, sadly, a kickback. As inevitable as it was, it was illogical: that people can imagine a fantasy of elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, talking trees and magic rings, but not a diversity of skin tone among these creatures, is laughably dumb. And it’s not even true to the books – the harfoots, for example (a kind of hobbit that we meet in this series), are described as being “browner of skin”. 

“I’m not super-surprised about it,” says Córdova, heavily. “I’m surprised when people are surprised. Like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know.’ I’m like, ‘Welcome! Dust yourself off from coming out of your cave.’ It’s hard but it’s not surprising to me at all. It’s still unnerving – racism is not something I understand because it has no logic behind it – but in a way, I was heavily prepared for it.” 

“It sounds crazy but because of how immersive it was, I felt like my character. Everything I imagined as a child, I was living. I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t get enough” – Ismael Cruz Córdova

However, these sad little trolls didn’t take away from the fact that this was a dream come true for Córdova. He describes one time that he was dressed in his costume – prosthetic elf ears included, of course – and was wandering around a village that had been specially constructed for the show. No one was around and, for a moment, it was like he was actually in Middle Earth. “I walked around, living my full elven fantasy. All I could see was the world; I walked up to a house they had on the hill, and the brush was moving, and all I could see were mountains and the set did not look like a set. It sounds crazy but because of how immersive it was, I felt like my character. Everything I imagined as a child, I was living. I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t get enough.”

The budget for this show is enormous, with figures ranging from $462-$715 million for the first season alone – and it was reflected in the sets, which Córdova frequently found himself in awe of, on more occasions than this one. He wasn’t technically allowed to venture on to other sets but remembers sneaking into Númenor (a kingdom of men established on an island, inhabited by the very distant forebears of Aragorn). “There was a big chunk of the city: courts, alleyways, corridors, balconies,” he says. “It was proper; they had incense burning, food being made – you really felt like you were in Númenor.” It’s no wonder that House of the Dragon (the new Game of Thrones series, released, sadly for them, less than two weeks before) looks so cheap by comparison.

And then there were the battle scenes, which were so immersive that Córdova says his imagination took over and he could almost see what the CGI later fills in. “I was very tuned in to that childlike, magical thinking. So I could really see the things that weren’t even there. You could see it, you know? I can just give you my journal on how many times I felt like this.” (Córdova says he kept a journal throughout filming.)

The language was another thing that contributed to the completeness of this fantasy. For the show, Córdova was tasked with learning Sindarin, just one of the elvish dialects cited in Tolkien’s Legendarium, a guide to the history of Middle Earth published after the author’s death. In an interview with The Rings of Power Wrap-up podcast, the series’ dialect coact Leith McPherson said he was a complete natural. “I mean, honestly, I’ve been unable to be humble about it,” he says with a laugh. “Because I love it so much. It felt like such a score you know. I was struggling at first with my RP accent, English isn’t my first language. So I still have my Hispanic kind of affectation. So that leap was quite strong and quite frustrating. So then suddenly there came this thing, elvish, and I just took to it.”

Being in this series is, obviously, incredibly meaningful to Córdova – but there’s an outward-facing side to all this, too. “As an Afro-Latino, as a Puerto Rican person, I always felt shut out of things,” says the actor, who hopes he can show kids like him that they, too, can be part of this world. “When people talk about these things, they all [talk about] race, but it’s also poverty. Poverty, I feel, shoves people into these corners which is like, that’s where you grew up. If you were born, that’s how you’re going to stay.” But Córdova’s journey from Puerto Rico to Middle Earth shows that’s just not true.