Page 55 - SHARP September 2022

WHEN ISMAEL CRUZ CÓRDOVA APPEARS ON ZOOM,
it’s difficult to make out the image on his graphic tee. “That’s Madonna, baby!” he exuberantly explains, pointing to the Material Girl. Córdova’s nails are painted a “soft sky blue,” matching the cloudless stretch of sky behind him in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He’s recently returned to his home in New York after two years in New Zealand, where he was filming the new Prime Video blockbuster TV series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Córdova’s buoyant demeanour is strikingly different from the characters he’s known for playing, like Hector Campos, the pro boxer with a secret on Showtime’s Ray Donovan; Lino Esparza, a gang leader in the 2019 action-thriller Miss Bala; or Fernando Alves, the widower of a murdered woman in the HBO miniseries The Undoing. It’s true that Córdova’s chiselled features and piercing stare project an intensity that make him well-suited to playing a man with a dark secret or mysterious past. But it’s his knack for bringing depth and dimension to complex characters that’s helped him transition from eye-catching scene-stealer to bona fide star. “They’re very curious,
very internal,” says Córdova of his LOTR character Arondir, a Silvan Elf who falls in love with a human.
Growing up, Córdova never got around to reading the classic Tolkien novels. At home in Aguas Buenas, a rural mountain town about a half-hour drive from San Juan, he wasn’t much of a reader. “The one book that was in my house was the Bible,” he says. “And not even that got read.” Competitive swimming earned him a spot in a prep school, where he thought about becoming a pediatrician after graduating, as a path out of generational poverty. “But even within my community, I was weird and artistic,” he says with a laugh. “I wanted to do calligraphy with ink that I made from flowers.”
At the first meeting of his high school’s drama club, he was tasked with reading a monologue in front of the group. “That was the moment where I experienced for the first time that people were gathered to listen to anything I had to say,” he recalls. “And I knew right then and there that this was different — and it changed my life. That moment, that’s when I set my path.” He began taking three buses into San Juan — a two-hour journey each way — for dance classes
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