A quarter of a century after The Lord of the Rings first reached cinemas, Peter Jackson’s extraordinary film trilogy is still revealing new surprises.
Behind-the-scenes tales from the multi-Oscar-winning production have become almost as famous as the JRR Tolkien novels that inspired it. Fans continue to debate which stories are true, dissecting the claims across Reddit threads and social media.
Did Viggo Mortensen really break his toe while kicking a helmet during the filming of The Two Towers? He did — and the actor’s anguished cry was left in the finished movie.
What about the claim that Sean Connery secretly shot a cameo after regretting his decision to turn down Gandalf? That story is false. Connery did reject the role, famously explaining that he “didn’t understand the script.”
Still, with the principal cast spending almost three years filming together in New Zealand, the production often felt more like a travelling carnival than a conventional movie set. There are enough stories about pranks, late-night antics and clashes of personality to fill an entire book.
For my new oral history of the trilogy, There and Back Again, I interviewed around 100 members of the cast and crew. Their recollections uncovered a host of little-known, forgotten and previously unheard stories about the making of The Lord of the Rings.
The cast developed a close fellowship during the three-year shoot (pictured from left to right: Sean Astin, Elijah Wood, Sir Ian McKellen and Dominic Monaghan)
The production often had a carnival-like atmosphere (pictured from left to right: Dominic Monaghan, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Liv Tyler, Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom)
Gangster rap and gay bars
The friendships forged during filming continued well beyond the set.
The cast made their way through virtually every pub and nightclub in Wellington, New Zealand. Dominic Monaghan, the young British actor who played the hobbit Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck, regularly took control of the DJ booth and sometimes kept the music going until 2am or 3am.
Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, may have been among the older members of the ensemble, but he was frequently part of the nightlife too — and would ask Monaghan to put on gangster rap.
Monaghan recalled McKellen eventually telling him: “After a few months of this, he approached us one day and said, ‘I’m coming to all these straight bars with straight guys, and as a proudly gay man, I’d like you to come and spend time with my friends and see the life I’m living.’”
“We were a little unsure. We thought, ‘It’s not really our scene, but we’ll give it a try.’”
“So one Friday night, Billy [Boyd, who played Pippin], Elijah [Wood, who played Frodo], Orlando [Bloom, who played the elf Legolas], Sean [Astin, who played Samwise Gamgee] and I went along. I don’t think any of us knew quite whether we would fit in.”
“Billy tells a brilliant story about going to the bar for a drink, then turning around to see Orlando and me standing on a table with our shirts off, waving them around. We had an amazing night.”
Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Viggo goes full Method
Viggo Mortensen joined the production at the last minute, after Peter Jackson made an 11th-hour decision to replace Irish actor Stuart Townsend. Mortensen had known virtually nothing about The Lord of the Rings before being cast as Aragorn, but he quickly became part of the sprawling cast and crew.
He formed a particularly strong connection with the stunt team.
Sala Baker, the stunt performer who also played Sauron, remembered Mortensen as an intensely committed performer: “Viggo was such a dude — a complete Method actor. He would arrive without shoes, carrying nothing but a scabbard and a sword, and he kept that sword with him all the time.”
The physical demands of the trilogy’s huge battle sequences were extreme, and injuries were inevitable. Even after taking a painful blow to the mouth, Mortensen chose to carry on filming.
Baker says: ‘I did break his tooth during Helm’s Deep [a key battle in the second film]. We’re doing a fight scene and he hits me, and I end up doing this turn by accident and hit him in the mouth with my shield and it cracked his tooth.
‘They had to super glue his tooth back on to finish the scene. Then he went to the dentist after we wrapped, which was two hours later.’
Orlando Bloom was equally in awe of how the man who would become a mentor to him during filming embodied his character.
‘We’d be at a bar,’ he says, ‘and there’d be broken glass on the floor and Viggo would be walking barefoot through it.’
Viggo Mortensen kept his sword with him at all times, even when he wasn’t acting and was known for walking around in his bare feet
During filming of the battle at Helm’s Deep, a stuntman broke Mortensen’s tooth
Ian McKellen has no hard feelings
By McKellen’s self-deprecating admission, he was not at the top of the list to play the great wizard Gandalf, commenting: ‘They only wanted me because the established stars said no. So I was in luck.’
He adds: ‘When people talk about actors’ careers, they underestimate the number of times that luck and good fortune come into play.’
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As confirmed by casting associate Scot Boland, the two men to turn down the role were Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins.
‘Hopkins got the first offer, Sean Connery the second, and then Ian. If it had been Anthony Hopkins or Sean Connery, the portrayal would have been nothing like this milkweed sort of hippie.’
It also seemed to rankle Christopher Lee, who eventually took the role of evil wizard Saruman, that he had been passed over for Gandalf. He had spent decades courting the role and made it a point to tell McKellen when they met over dinner in New Zealand.
McKellen joked: ‘The first day I arrived… Peter [Jackson, the filmmaker] invited me to supper in Wellington with the Hobbits, and also this actor I didn’t know who was playing Saruman.
‘[Lee] announced to me and the team in general that he read Lord of the Rings every now and then and always thought he should have played Gandalf.’
Peter Jackson directing Ian McKellen, who admits he only got the role of Gandalf when the first two choices turned it down
McKellen said: ‘When people talk about actors’ careers, they underestimate the number of times that luck and good fortune come into play’
Keeping Orlando’s ego in check
At the time of filming, Bloom was yet to become a big name. But that didn’t stop him playing the star on set.
‘Orlando would go around town propositioning women, and this was before the film had come out,’ Jamie Beswarick, one of the creature makers at Weta Workshop, says.
‘In Queenstown, the [cast] all stopped in this hotel and basically Orlando had a bit of an attitude and Viggo and Sean Bean were coming back from having a few drinks and knocked on his door and he was practically naked.
‘They dragged him down to the foyer and Sean sat on him and smacked him on the stomach and put him in line because he was a bit cocky.’
A still relatively unknown Orlando Bloom would go around town propositioning women
Fueled by Red Bull
Such was the crunch time on delivering the final cut of Return of the King, Peter Jackson never saw the last edit before the night of the premiere in Wellington.
The films’ director, screenwriter and producer regularly put in 24-hour shifts, going round the clock to get them finished, on time and perfected. And his crew followed suit.
‘My longest day… was 21.5 hours,’ says hair and make-up artist Kerryn Flewell-Smith.
‘We did work 40 hours once, all on Red Bull,’ adds Ravi Dube, who was responsible for transport logistics.
And Miranda Rivers, casting director, says: ‘There were days when I’d never felt such exhaustion. I’ve never worked those kind of hours in my life.’
So, with the final film running more than three hours and 20 minutes (the extended edition is an hour longer), it became impractical to watch it from beginning to end in its entirety before the premiere.
Such a thing is surely unheard of in Hollywood, certainly for a director who was so obsessive about every detail and editing went on until the last possible minute.
Annie Collins, additional editor on the film and in the editing suite for all three movies, explains the surreal nature of the finish better than anyone.
Peter Jackson often worked 24-hour days (pictured directing Sean Astin)
‘We locked film three on October 31, Peter’s birthday. And there was still work to be done because of the CGI material coming in. Peter and Jamie [Selkirk, the films’ editor] never saw the full film of Return of the King until the premiere.
‘I’ve never seen a full cut of it. I was at the premiere and I fell asleep.’
Orlando Bloom also admitted to only seeing all three films in their entirety during lockdown.
‘I watched the films for the first time with my son over Covid and he loved them. We watched the extended editions, which I had never seen before.
‘I watched it and just felt very grateful that it’s been part of my makeup. Somewhere in my physical and emotional memory, that experience has informed everything else I have done in my life.’
There and Back Again: The Unofficial Oral History of The Lord of the Rings Films by Sam Moore is published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.