Deep in the caverns of Khazad-dûm, there is panic. A mine has collapsed, and dwarves are trapped. But Princess Disa (Sophia Nomvete) can save them, lifting up her voice in an impassioned song, urging the mountains to free her people. “Disa’s gift is to resonate, and the rocks listen. She speaks to the mountains,” says Nomvete, who plays the dwarf princess.  

It’s a powerful scene in episode 4 of Amazon Prime Video’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” as her voice saves the lives of the miners, and, as a character created for the series, she establishes herself as a force within the story.   

Director Wayne Yip told her that this moment was to be pivotal. 

It’s a wordless song, full of lament, pleading and power. “This female dwarf, which we’ve never seen before in this particular way, has a gift, which is to draw out from the depths of her soul and use her voice to literally move mountains. We knew that we wanted to make sure that it was coming from a place much deeper. We wanted to play with the sounds, so they let me have free rein and I would sit in studios with a mic, and we would I would just play with the voice.” 

They recorded her song live, with Rob Aramayo, who plays Elrond, “hearing it for the first time and no one else on set had heard it. We wanted it to be live.”  

When Elrond turns to Disa and asks in wonder, “What … was that?” he’s speaking for the audience too. 

“It was a really quiet and calm set, and I genuinely feel like I blacked out for about 10 hours of that day and just let it rip. It’s really organic and it comes from a place of authentic creativity and so it’s such an important thing for me.  

After the shoot, music supervisor Bear McCreary then took over and added “his magic to it,” putting other voices in, she says.   

“A little secret is that myself and Bear had an ADR session a bit later to kind of work out whether there was more stuff that we could do, and he said that actually he worked on a few bits, but most of that take is at 90% — if not 100% — live, because he said there was nothing he could add.”  

Portraying the pivotal character was a big step for the London-based stage veteran Nomvete. She was pregnant, and just days away from delivering, when she auditioned.   

“I did 15, 16 years in straight theater, and this was my first real television gig,” she says, noting that she “worked and worked and worked her way up” and when she became pregnant, she sort of saw that as the end of chapter 1.  

“I felt I was in an industry that I was aware that things might slow down for me, because historically that’s how it’s been for women,” she says, thinking that she hadn’t gotten the role “because I’d never, ever, ever even auditioned for a show of this scale in my entire life or career.”  

But the casting director was looking for the kind of gregariousness and theatricality in the actors who would play the dwarves — they are small but have huge personalities. Nomvete ticked off that box. And she could sing, too, slaying the soulful “Ain’t No Sunshine.”  

“The Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien would be proud of this female dwarf. “Music lives in Tolkien’s work and so I knew they wanted to honor that,” she says.  

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