Ismael Cruz Córdova, the elf a corner of Tolkien fandom refused to accept

Ismael Cruz Córdova

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 7, 1987 Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Mary Queen of Scots, Miss Bala, Finestkind

The messages kept arriving in the same words: you cannot be an elf because you are not white. Ismael Cruz Córdova has quoted that sentence in interviews almost word for word, because nothing sums up more cleanly what he walked into when Amazon cast him as Arondir, a Silvan elf soldier in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Long before the first episode streamed, the abuse had left the comment sections. His phone was hacked, his bank and PayPal accounts were targeted, strangers found his address and posted things to it. His answer, as he tells it, was to make his elf the most Elven one anyone had seen. That is the nearest thing he has to a method, and it explains a career built on characters that unsettle some part of the audience.

The road to that casting starts in Aguas Buenas, a town in the hills south of San Juan, where Cruz Córdova grew up poor, in a house with dirt floors and no indoor bathroom. He was the only boy in a home of sisters, aunts and cousins, a detail he would later use as a key to one of his best roles. His mother put Sesame Street on so he would learn English. At fifteen he joined his high school drama club and was soon working in local commercials and Puerto Rican films such as Bala perdida and El cuerpo del delito.

He was nineteen, born on 7 April 1987, when he moved to New York in 2006 to study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 2009 after a senior year spent as resident assistant in a freshman dormitory. Guest parts followed, including a run on The Good Wife. Then came the casting that closed a circle few actors get to close: in September 2013 he joined Sesame Street as Armando, known as Mando, a young Latino writer with a gadget habit who taught the Muppets to rhyme in Spanish. The boy who had picked up English from that street was now living on it.

Film arrived through supporting roles chosen with unusual care. Ang Lee cast him as Sergeant Holliday in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and Showtime gave him four episodes of Ray Donovan as Hector Campos. The breakthrough was David Rizzio in Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots, the queen’s secretary and confidant, played as a man who moves easily between masculine and feminine and is murdered by courtiers who cannot stand his closeness to her. Cruz Córdova told The Advocate he understood Rizzio through his own childhood. “I grew up with all women,” he said.

He then went the other way. In Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss Bala he played Lino Esparza, the leader of the Las Estrellas cartel, written as a man who had lived undocumented in Bakersfield before he was deported and pushed into crime. Television kept him in demand: a prisoner named Qin in an episode of The Mandalorian, then Fernando Alves in HBO’s The Undoing, the grieving and volatile husband of the murdered woman at the centre of the series, and a turn in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Arondir changed the scale. Unlike the elves of Peter Jackson‘s trilogy, almost all of them nobles, Arondir is a foot soldier stationed in the Southlands, in love with a human healer. Amazon took the reaction seriously enough to hire an on-set therapist, as Cruz Córdova later told Variety. By the second season he had trained hard in martial arts and stunt choreography and shared one of its biggest set pieces, a fight with a hill troll alongside Elrond.

The uncomfortable part of the story is that the casting debate has often swallowed the work. For two seasons, coverage of Arondir dwelt more on who was allowed to play him than on what he did with him, and Cruz Córdova has spent a good share of his press time defending his own presence rather than discussing performance. His film choices have not always helped. Miss Bala drew reviews doubting its credibility. The Pickup, the Tim Story heist comedy with Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson in which he played Miguel, was largely panned when Prime Video released it in August 2025. And a pattern has set in: the husband, the ex, the man orbiting someone else’s plot. Talent is not the issue; studios still seem unsure what to build around him.

2026 has been the busiest year of his career. In February Prime Video released The Bluff, Frank E. Flowers’ pirate thriller produced by AGBO, with Cruz Córdova as T.H. Bodden, husband of Priyanka Chopra Jonas‘s retired buccaneer. In March He Bled Neon, Drew Kirsch’s Las Vegas crime drama with Joe Cole and Rita Ora, premiered at SXSW with him as Luis. At the LA Latino International Film Festival he presented They Killed Pedro, Kristian Mercado’s short with John Leguizamo among its producers, in which he plays the Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos during the sugar-cane strikes of the 1930s.

On 2 October Verity opened in cinemas. In Michael Showalter’s adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel, he is Corey, the literary agent and former lover of Dakota Johnson‘s Lowen, opposite Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. The offer reached him while he was resting in Puerto Rico; he dropped the character’s tie and played him, in his words to Culturizando, as more “pícaro” and flirtatious than the book’s version. He has made no secret of where he comes from, and told the same outlet that no one can take away his pride in it, nor the “mancha de plátano”, the plantain stain Puerto Ricans use as shorthand for the island in the blood.

Next comes the return to Middle-earth. The third season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Prime Video on 11 November with four episodes, followed by two on 18 November and the last two on 25 November. “It starts hot,” he told Latin Times. Meanwhile he is shooting Porto Rico in the Dominican Republic, the directing debut of Residente, built around the revolutionary José Maldonado Román, known as Águila Blanca, with Bad Bunny in the lead alongside Viggo Mortensen and Edward Norton. “This is historic,” Cruz Córdova said of the production. For an actor once told what an elf cannot look like, a Puerto Rican epic made at that scale is a different kind of answer.

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Tags: actors, Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Verity, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Sesame Street

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