Maybe if I mention Eddie Marsan to you he doesn’t ring a bell, but the truth is that he’s going to become one of your favorite actors of the year, when you see him raising hell playing Thráin, the elder brother of King Durin IV in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In the dwarven Game of Thrones the series is setting up for season 3, he’s got every chance to be one of the favorites to take the crown… And the funny thing is this isn’t the first time he’s crossed paths with the saga.
2,000 ears to rule them all
Because it turns out Marsan is married to Janine Schneider-Marsan, one of the makeup artists on the original trilogy, as he himself says: “I was shooting Gangs of New York and I flew out to see her in New Zealand, where we’d spend some time together. And she kept going for years afterward to do the sequels and do pickup shoots. So it was part of the start of our marriage for three or four years”.
In fact, since she did the makeup for Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler, she couldn’t help taking the work home with her. Literally: “In our old house, in the attic, we had about 2,000 pairs of Orlando Bloom ears”. And if you’re wondering how you live with that many ears, the actor himself has an answer: “I was this close to taking them to the set of The Rings of Power to see if they wanted them! But they were already part of our family”. Literally, a house with ears everywhere.
The actor makes it clear that he was already watching the series, and that he adored the end of season 2. “I thought it was incredible. And then they come to me and say, ‘Would you like to play Peter Mullan’s son?’. And two things were going on. I wanted to do it because I thought the series was brilliant, the script was great, the direction too, and the action. But also so I could piss Peter off and say I was going to play his son”. Ah, pissing off your friends: the reason you do everything in life.
