Anya Taylor-Joy will make her Middle-earth debut as Seren, an original Woodland Elf, in Warner Bros.’ forthcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. Her casting matters because the character has no established Tolkien backstory, leaving the film to define how she looks, behaves and fits within the wider franchise.

Ismael Cruz Córdova, who plays the original Elf Arondir in Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, said Taylor-Joy should draw on Elves’ connection with nature. He described them as people who respect the world as a living thing and understand humanity is not its dominant species, arguing that this reverence is central to their “elvenness”; Córdova jokingly added that she was “on her own”.