‘The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim’ Co-Writer Philippa Boyens Says Main Goal In Creating Hèra Was To Make Her “Feel Real”
According to The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim co-writer Philippa Boyens, she and her fellow writers approached the fleshing out of the film’s main protagonist, Hèra, with the goal of making her feel like a “real” person.
As readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original texts may recall, while the animated film presents the red-haired princess as both a capable (and particularly brutal) swordfighter and an assertive, self-starting adventurer, she was never actually portrayed this way in her singular source material appearance in the series’ Appendix A, as found at the back of The Return of the King.
Rather, not only does she go completely unnamed, the entirety of her time on the page amounts to a single solitary sentence, its full text reading, “To one of these councils Freca rode with many men, and he asked the hand of Helm’s daughter for his son Wulf.”
Yet, despite her exceptionally brief role in Tolkien’s rendition of the titular conflict, the soon-to-be-named Hèra was ultimately chosen to serve as the main protagonist of The War of the Rohirrim.
However, before Boyens and her fellow writers could begin to essentially create an entirely new heroine out of thin air, they had to settle on a specific idea for her character – and per the writer herself, that direction ultimately centered on her authenticity as a real, living person.
Boyens, who in addition to the recently released animated film previously penned the screenplays for all six movies in the original Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, provided this insight into Hèra’s development process during a recent post-premiere interview given to Nerdist’s Rotem Rusak.
Pressed by her host as to what she considered “really important to feature in [Hèra’s] character”, the noted screenwriter asserted, “We wanted her to feel real, strangely enough.”
“I mean, which is kind of a weird thing to say because she’s an animated character,” she explained to Rusak. “She’s in a fantasy world, but [director] Kenji Kamiyama, I don’t know, he’s some kind of magician. Somehow he manages to make those characters feel real. I also have to give credit to Gaia Wise, who voices her. We worked with Gaia over a span of three years, and genuinely there’s her DNA in that character.”
“I can tell you a quick little story,” Boyens continued. “[Wise] turned up to record one day, we were recording in London. I think we’d already laid down the first voice tracks, and then some animation had started coming through. And we’d come back to London, and now she was getting to revoice, and we had some new lines, etcetera, to picture.”
“But she turned up, and she’d been knocked off her bike, and she had blood coming down her leg,” the writer further recalled. “And I was like a mother hen, immediately. And she was like, “No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. Let’s go, let’s go.” And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Hèra.'”
Boyens would further highlight this goal of authenticity in response to being asked by Rusak as to whether or not Hèra’s constant espousal of her ‘anti-marriage’ sentiments, such as her declaration of “I am a bride to no man”, was ever intended to be taken as an indicator that the princess preferred the company of the fairer sex, to which the writer would adamantly protest, “No, honestly, legitimately, no.”
“And I think this is the interesting thing in terms of that, that is the beauty of what you can do with Professor Tolkien because I think there’s an accessibility to these characters that you can have, and you can try and make them as real as possible,” she said. “But I can tell you we did go and look back on some histories, medieval histories, to sort of make sure she was feeling authentic. And there are many times you can find women who refuse to marry. They did not want to marry. And some of them paid a price for that choice. There is actually quite a surprising number of historical women characters who said, ‘No, I’m not marrying any man.'”
“It’s interesting, an interesting perspective,” Boyens concluded. “And I would say to that, I would say, ‘Why not?’ Maybe! But also, we can never know.'”
For fans who have yet to take a ride alongside The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim, the film is now playing in theaters – but judging by it’s box office results, it might not be around that much longer.
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