Cate Blanchett has revealed she requested a secret role playing a “hairy dwarf” in The Hobbit.
Blanchett played Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as his Hobbit prequel series, but told Marc Maron’s WTF podcast that she had hoped to do more as there aren’t “too many chicks in the Tolkien universe”.
She revealed that, while working on The Hobbit, she petitioned Jackson and Fran Walsh, his wife and co-screenwriter on the films, to allow her to play a different character in secret.
“They were doing a banquet scene with a whole lot of dwarves,” she remembered. “I always wanted to play the bearded lady, so I asked them, ‘Could I be your hairy wife woman when you pan across the banquet table of dwarves?’”
She then said that she ended up unable to play the role because of scheduling.
Blanchett also said that, despite the Lord of the Rings films taking months to film, she was able to shoot her minimal role as Galadriel in “just three weeks”.
In 2019, it was revealed that Blanchett has form with secret roles in films.
In an oral history of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut published by Vulture, it was revealed, after 20 years, that Blanchett had lent her voice to a masked woman glimpsed during an orgy scene.
