The White Lady of Rohan, by Ian Spelling

I'm very pleased with the finished film," says Miranda Otto of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, in which she plays Éowyn, niece of Théoden (Bernard Hill), the King of Rohan. "I was a bit gobsmacked at first, actually. There were a few of us from the film who saw it for the first time together. I felt pretty elated and tingly, but also kind of exhausted. I felt like I had been on a really big journey. And it certainly didn't feel like three hours at all. I was really surprised by what I saw and heard. I'm just in certain parts of the film, so to see my sections was exciting, and to see everything else, too, was just incredible.

"I liked finally getting to see Gollum, because we only got that tease of him in The Fellowship of the Ring. I loved the Battle of Helm's Deep. I know how much went into shooting that. When they're standing there and it starts to rain, I just thought, 'Oh, my God.' Those poor guys went through three months of hell shooting that. But it looks great. I loved all the big battles. And I love the smaller personal moments, too. You see everything that happens, but also what it means to Aragorn, Frodo, Sam, Arwen, Éowyn, Gimli, Théoden and pretty much everyone else."

Portraying Éowyn in both The Two Towers and The Return of the King, Otto "was intrigued because she's a wonderful perversion of the [princess] kind of character. She's also known as the White Lady of Rohan, but if you look at the normal princess type of role, she's such a departure from that [stereotype]. In some of the stories we're given as children, like 'Sleeping Beauty' and 'Cinderella,' the women are so passive and inactive. They're in some terrible situation and they go to sleep for 100 years and they have to wait for someone to come and save them. In some ways, Éowyn is set up a little bit like that, even though she has more strength.

"So when Aragorn [Viggo Mortensen] comes and she falls in love with him, you think, 'Well, that's the way these stories go.' But it doesn't go that way. In the third film, in the third part of the book, the story takes a completely different turn and Éowyn becomes a very strong, active character who is extremely integral to the plot. That's what intrigued me--that at first you have this image of a princess woman in the medieval costume, the hair and all that, but underneath she's a very strong and active character."

Ring of Love

Pre-release rumors abounded that there would be romance in the air in The Two Towers, and not just between lovers Aragorn and Arwen (Liv Tyler), but also between Aragorn and Éowyn. "I wouldn't say that it's a triangle at all," Otto objects. "In my opinion, Éowyn's love of Aragorn is about everything he represents: That he would be king, that he's the last of the Numenoreans and that he's the [one] man who can save everything. She would like to unite with somebody like Aragorn because he represents everything that has been lost. In some ways, she doesn't really know him at all. Much of it has to do with everything that he symbolizes. But I wouldn't say that it's a triangle in any way, because the three are never together.

"It's more that my character is in love with somebody who can never love her back. It was very important to me--when people started talking about, 'Oh, will it be a love triangle?'--that in a film with so few women, that the women shouldn't be fighting over one man. I don't think anybody wanted that. Pete [Jackson] certain- didn't want that. So it's more that Aragorn is sad because he thinks he has lost Arwen and Éowyn is in love with Aragorn. It's all very complex, but it's definitely not a triangle."

As for the Romeo-and-Juliet comparison that has been made regarding Aragorn and Éowyn's relationship, Otto remarks: "There's more of a lightness in Juliet, the lightness of a younger person who has led a more protected life and is able, at first, to enjoy all the wonderfulness of love. And that love is requited. Éowyn's love is really much more unrequited. And Éowyn has lived through a lot of distress. Her father died. Her mother died of grief. Éowyn has lived in this kingdom during a time when everything has gone to rack and ruin. She has watched her king, Per uncle, fall under a spell from Saruman, and she's unable to act. Éowyn believes that she's a strong fighter and would like to take action, but she's constantly pushed aside. She feels misunderstood. So she doesn't have quite the naive quality that Juliet has. At the same time, being in love is a little frightening for Éowyn . She's very capable on many levels, but it's a frightening thing to fall in love with somebody."

Ring of Intensity

Otto first heard about the Lord of the Rings trilogy from Robert Zemeckis while she was filming What Lies Beneath. The director figured that since Otto is Australian and Rings director Jackson is a Kiwi, the two probably knew each other. While Otto--whose credits include The 13th Floor (a 1988 Australian chiller, not the Roland Emmerich production), The Last Days of Chez Nous and Human Nature--only knew of Jackson, she nonetheless received a call inviting her to audition for Éowyn. The actress then went in, tested, won the role and flew off to New Zealand, where cast and crew had already been long entrenched in production.

"I don't think they could have afforded to shoot the films anywhere but New Zealand," says Otto. "New Zealand let them make it much less expensively than if they had shot it in America or somewhere in Europe. But there were so many other advantages to shooting in New Zealand. The landscape there is quite incredible. They built Edoras from scratch and it looks brilliant. I also think that shooting in New Zealand gave us a sense of anonymity and took a little of the pressure off. We were so far away from the press and from other people. We didn't feel like we were constantly being watched. That was great. It became our own world down there.

"They had shot a lot of Fellowship of the Ring at the beginning, and I wasn't there. I came in for a little bit in March 2000, and then I came back and started in August and went through to the end of December, which is when they finished everything. They shot a lot of Fellowship first, and then they shot The Two Towers and The Return of the King pretty much together. It was a very intense time. There were particular weeks where you were working every day and switching from one set to another set and from one film to another. And then you might have four days off. But there were always other things that you had to be doing, like swordfight training, dialect coaching or learning Old English."

In short, making Rings was both a grand experience and a great ordeal. "It was a very fun time and a really good group of people," Otto says. "They were great to hang out with and very open from the time that I arrived. Someone left a message for me that said, 'We're all going to dinner. Come along.' I didn't know anybody, but within half an hour, I felt that I had known them all for a very long time. But it was very intense, particularly toward the end, during the last three weeks. We all had so much to do to finish it. Pete was absolutely, doggedly determined that we finish it by December 22, and there was so much of the film [left] to shoot. By the end, we were all very quiet. I was sleeping two or three hours a night and was so wired.

"I think we were also all bracing ourselves for the fact that this had been such a huge part of our lives for so long:' she adds. "For me, it was only six months, but it was 18 months or longer for many people. We were all frightened about what would happen to us after we finished. How would we get by without this huge support system that we had had around us? When I went back home to Australia just before Christmas, I found it really hard to talk to people. There was this intense look that everyone in the cast had in their eyes; we understood each other. And then when I went back to normal, relaxed people, it was interesting, because I must have seemed like this strung-out, freaky person who could only talk about Lord of the Rings or the books, characters and costumes. It took about two months to calm down.

"I've had about six other jobs since then, so it took some other characters to move away from this one. The funny thing was that when we went back to do the reshoots this year, we also had to do the electronic press kit, which is where you do interviews for the camera. I had been doing so many other things and had only just arrived there, so it was hard to remember everything and I'm not sure that I got it all right. So before I came here [to New York City to promote The Two Towers], I found all of my notes and went over them again just to make sure I remembered my thoughts at the time [of filming]."

It doesn't take much, then, for Otto to recall her feelings about Éowyn's involvement in the Rings series' second installment. "I do get involved in the action, but not in the big Helm's Deep battle or anything like that," she says. "But there's more action in the third film, and Éowyn gets to swordfight. She's thwarted a lot, though. And I felt thwarted, too. I would say to Pete, 'But I could get on a horse and I could do this!' Pete would say, 'No, no, no. You just stay off the horse and don't do that. We're not going to have that.' But I wanted to do it. It was wonderful to be a part of something so big.

"I remember that on the second-to-last day of shooting, we were filming some of Aragorn's coronation [for Return of the King]. It was second unit, not even first unit. We had something like 300 extras all in costume, and there were all these sets that had been built, And there were trucks everywhere, and they had all of this equipment. I thought about all of the Australian films I had worked on where If you wanted a crane for a scene, you had to budget for the crane and could only have it for that day. [On Rings) we had eight trucks and plenty of cranes, and I thought, 'I'll never work on something this big again.' I mean, who will make three films at once again? They might make three films separately, but not three at once. I felt like I was a part of film history."

Ring of Terror

What Lies Beneath wasn't a production of Rings proportions, but it did star Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer and went on to scare up big bucks at the box office. "It was good being the red herring, because I knew that I couldn't be cut out of it," Otto jokes. "I liked that part, because so many roles for women are about being the girl friend or the lovely woman. It was great to play a part that was so dramatic and motivated.

"At first, it was scary being on a big film like that, because you feel like the stakes are all upped and that if you mess up or take a long time, it's so much more dollars per minute that you're wasting. It was fascinating watching someone like Robert Zemeckis do what he does with a camera. As an actor, you get very involved in your own thing and your performance, but I became interested in how the camera tells the story, and how the camera moves at an exact moment to give a scene emphasis. Pushing the camera into someone's face can bring the emotion to the screen. So when I was on the set and not shooting anything, I was watching how Zemeckis used the camera to tell the story."

Otto also learned plenty watching Jackson on the Rings set. "He's very Hobbit-like by nature," she remarks. "I think unflappable is the word that I would use. I don't know how someone can have all that in his head. He had. three films in his head, and they weren't just three normal films, but three huge films. He had them all in his head at once and yet could be completely in the scene that he was directing that day. Pete knew exactly where that scene fit into the whole scheme of things. So he could be completely specific in the moment while also keeping the big picture in mind.

"He had all these monitors in front of him on the set. He would be working with me and also looking at these screens, which would be showing pieces of action being shot by the second unit. He was directing those [sequences] over the phone, saying, 'Yeah, yeah, I like that shot. That's perfect' or 'No. I want it wider." [You have to have a) Hobbit's nature not to get traumatized by all that. Pete has this very stoic quality. He just gets through everything and never seems to be deterred. I've seen him cranky, but never at the actors. He'll get a look in his eyes and hit his head if something really perturbs him. So he's like a Hobbit, and we always joked that his partner, Fran [Walsh], is like an Elf. She's very beautiful. She has big, beautiful eyes and long, dark hair. So it was an Elf and a Hobbit."

The Two Towers and The Return of the King will surely raise Otto's profile, but chances are they won't much affect her choice of roles. As noted earlier, she has already completed six other projects since wrapping Rings, among them the low-budget comedy Human Nature (released in 2002), the Italian drama La Volpe a Tre Zampe, Polish director Agnieszka Holland's Julie Walking Home and the horror-thriller Hypnotic (formerly Doctor Sleep).

"I'm only ambitious concerning the roles I want to play and the people I want to work with," she notes. "When I want to do something, I'll audition and do anything to get it. I'll work incredibly hard and do so much research. I've even been known to write letters to directors, saying how much I would like to do something together. But in terms of just being famous or out there, I don't have any ambitions. My ambitions are really work-driven.

"I like to see what I'm capable of doing. I like to mix it up and work with people who inspire me to take risks and do things that I haven't done before, perhaps things I didn't think I was capable of doing. My career has been really varied. I've worked in different genres and done stage and film, and I would like to keep it d! that way. That's what inspires me about I acting. If I happen to do a film that ends up being big, that's fabulous, but I also want to do small films with great directors and great parts.

"I think," Miranda Otto sums up, "that you just have to follow your instincts."