11. SEAN BEAN HIKED UP A MOUNTAIN IN CHARACTER.
Sean Bean often chose not to take a helicopter to the mountain filming locations for The Fellowship of the Ring, opting instead to trek to the sets in his full Boromir costume.“I used to be a bit terrified of flying,” he said, so “I had to walk the whole way, really. I was two hours behind everybody else on top of this mountain because I just didn’t want to get into any helicopters.”
12. BRET MCKENZIE FROM FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS MADE A CAMEO.
Bret McKenzie, known for his role in Flight of the Conchords, has a brief cameo in The Fellowship of the Ring, where he portrays an unnamed Elf during the Council of Elrond scene. A fan named Iris Hadad took notice of McKenzie’s character, dubbing him Figwit (short for “Frodo is great… who is that?”) and even creating a fansite called Figwit Lives in his honor. In response to the grassroots enthusiasm for the character, Peter Jackson included him in The Return of the King as “Elf Escort,” giving him a line of dialogue “just for fun for the fans.” (In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, McKenzie plays an elf named Lindir, clarifying that the two characters are distinct as they have “slightly different ears.”)
13. A WHOLE ACTION SCENE WAS WASHED AWAY BY A FLOOD.
The climax of The Fellowship of the Ring initially included a thrilling sequence where the heroes are ambushed by a group of Orcs as they navigate the rapids of the Anduin River.“We had all kinds of action planned with boats flipping over … and Legolas’s boat afloat as it bucks and tosses, while the Elf—standing with a foot on each of the gunwales—would be firing arrows at the attackers,” Jackson shared. But Mother Nature had other ideas, and a massive flood—in addition to causing a state of emergency in Queenstown, New Zealand—swepted the entire ambush set down the river
14. BILL THE PONY WAS ACTUALLY TWO PEOPLE IN A HORSE COSTUME.
In the Midgewater Marshes scene of The Fellowship of the Ring, Sam’s pony Bill was portrayed by a “panto pony,” a clever solution to the challenges of working with a live animal in a swampy setting. If you’re wondering what a “panto pony” is, it’s simply a costume where one person operates the front half and another handles the back. It wasn’t an easy task either. “We had a terrible time getting the pony to walk through the marshes because the performers were completely blind, ensconced in the costume and standing in a real swamp,” Jackson explained.Bill would try to walk and then would start to wobble and everyone would have to rush in and catch him before he fell over! There was one hilarious moment where the front legs moved without the back legs and Bill got stretched into a sort of long sausage dog!
15. SEAN BEAN WAS READING HIS SCRIPT DURING THE COUNCIL OF ELROND SCENE.
Throughout the production of The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, were continuously revising the script, often providing actors with new lines to memorize the night before they were set to shoot. This was true for Boromir’s iconic speech in the Council of Elrond scene. If you pay close attention, you can spot Sean Bean occasionally glancing down at the new script page taped to his knee during the scene.
16.WOMEN IN BEARDS WERE CAST AS EXTRAS.
Many of the Riders of Rohan in The Two Towers and The Return of the King were actually women sporting fake beards. “There are some exceptional female riders in New Zealand, so it would be foolish not to use their talents,” Mortensen noted in the extras of The Two Towers Extended Edition.
17. HE URUK-HAI AT HELM’S DEEP ARE NEW ZEALAND CRICKET FANS.
During the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers, the menacing chants of the Uruk-hai army were recorded from a stadium filled with New Zealand cricket fans. “There’s this Black Speech battle cry the Uruk do,” said executive producer Mark Ordesky. “We wrote it out phonetically on the Diamond Vision screen and Peter directed 25,000 people going ‘Rrwaaa harra farr rrara!”’
18. A SCENE WHERE ARAGORN FIGHTS SAURON IS IN THE RETURN OF THE KING… SORT OF.
Peter Jackson filmed a sequence for the end of The Return of the King featuring Aragorn facing off against a physical representation of Sauron, reminiscent of the Sauron-Isildur battle from the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring.“By the time we had got to post-production,” Jackson remembers, the scene “no longer felt right,” so they cut it. But they did still use the footage: In the final battle, Aragorn can be seen battling a giant cave troll that was digitally superimposed over what was originally meant to be Sauron
19. ONE OF THE MOST EMOTIONAL SCENES WAS FILMED OVER THE COURSE OF ONE YEAR.
It’s widely known that the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy was shot over a continuous period. However, similar to many film productions, the shooting schedule wasn’t linear, meaning that on any given day, scenes from different parts of the trilogy were being filmed. One notable example involves the poignant scene in The Return of the King where Frodo, manipulated by Gollum into believing Sam has betrayed him, instructs his loyal companion to go home. First, Sam’s portion was filmed, followed by Frodo’s—one year later.“Every time we cut to and fro between Frodo and Sam we are actually jumping back and forth across a year-long gap,” Jackson explained
20. FRODO ORIGINALLY "STRAIGHT-UP" MURDERED GOLLUM.
The climactic encounter between Frodo and Gollum in The Return of the King was originally intended to conclude with Frodo pushing Gollum off the edge into Mount Doom, an act that Jackson described as “straight-up murder”, but at the time we were OK with it because we felt everyone wanted Frodo to kill Gollum. But, of course, it was very un-Tolkien, because it flew in the face of everything that he wanted his heroes to be.” Years later, the scene was re-shot as it ended up in the film.
