'Lord Of The Rings' Star Ismael Cruz Cordova Fought To Play An Elf & It's His 'Dream' Role

What are elves, if not people wearing pointy ears?

For Lord of the Rings star Ismael Cruz Cordova, elves — and those pointy ears — mean everything.

The Rings Of Power actor recently opened up to Narcity about playing Arondir the elf in Amazon's new prequel series, and confessed that he's been chasing this dream since he was a boy.

"Arondir is a warrior, and by this point all these obstacles made me feel like (a warrior) too," he said. "I had to play this guy."

Cordova says he grew up in a "very poor" community in the mountains of Puerto Rico, and The Lord of the Rings was the first DVD his family ever owned.

"I immediately identified with these (elves), spiritually," he said. He added that he was a quiet kid who was often bullied, and he liked to retreat to the top of his favourite mango tree with his homework at the end of each day.

"It was like the Giving Tree," he said. "I had a very close connection with that, so I felt very elven."

There was just one problem: "There were no elves that looked like me."

Fast-forward several years and Cordova lands an audition to play Arondir, a new elf character created for the Amazon prequel. He says he fought for the role and was rejected "a bunch of times," but he just kept trying until he got it.

Arondir gets in on the action early in Rings of Power, and he plays one half of a star-crossed romance with a human peasant, played by Nazanin Boniadi.

It's a big role — arguably bigger than even Orlando Bloom's Legolas the elf in the LOTR movies.

Cordova stopped to marvel at scoring his dream role in late July, when he wrote an emotional post about in on Instagram. The post showed him wearing a shirt with the Puerto Rico flag on it, drawing an imaginary bow back. Behind him, you can see Arondir doing the same thing in a poster for Rings of Power.

"I had a dream once — a dream of being an Elf," he wrote in the post. "I grew up poor in a mountain town in Puerto Rico, fighting to find my voice. Dreaming of one day existing in places from which myself and my people had been shut out."

He says people laughed at him and told him: "You can't be an Elf. There are no Black Elves. There are no Latino Elves."

That same toxic criticism has been swirling around this new LOTR spinoff, which features far more women and people of colour than were ever seen in the movies or highlighted in J.R.R. Tolkien's books. Look no further than the comments section on any given Rings Of Power story and you'll see it.

But Cordova ultimately proved his doubters wrong, and he hopes he can inspire others to chase that same dream.

"I always say, if you can see it, you can imagine it. If you can imagine it, you can create it," he told Narcity.

"And now they can see themselves here, and they can create whatever the hell they want."

He was just as proud and defiant in his Instagram post.

"Here I am," he wrote. "Black, Latino, Puerto Rican, proud, and Elven AF. You better catch that arrow and aim it as high as you can."