‘I would never have guessed at that point that we would have Elijah Wood as Frodo or Sean Astin as Sam. It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. I was seeing fantasy characters. Hobbits that were this tall.’
The worldwide search for hobbits along with all the species of the cast began in the summer of 1998.2 A process, Ordesky insists, that was filmmaker driven. ‘It was exactly what you would hope it would be. New Line waited until Peter had between five or half a dozen finalists for any give role. Then I would get sent a videotape of the options.’ Jackson would always hint which of the five or six he liked the most. It was an effective way of clarifying his thoughts.
Ordesky sighs. ‘I should have realized then that this was going to be my task through the whole thing — to run around New Line showing them all the options and basically getting approval for Peter’s choices.’
Not that the studio was always going to be entirely accommodating either.
While faceless, Jackson convinced himself that the four lead hobbits at the very least would be actors who ‘corresponded’ with Tolkien’s description of little English gentlemen.3 The Shire’s general population of Baggins, Boffins, Tooks, Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots would, in the case of the party sequence, be filled with a gaggle of up to 100 eccentric New Zealand extras.
Producer Barrie Osborne remembers that, on the day he met Jackson in Wellington, the director invited him along to watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He was considering the English actor Nick Moran as one of either Merry or Pippin. Not that he was wedded to established actors. If anything, unknowns would help sustain the reality of the world, and Merry and Pippin would emerge from hundreds who tried their luck on the audition tapes stacking up at Stone Street.
Away from the trials of the Ringbearer and his faithful servant, Frodo’s lighthearted hobbit cousins provide a comic reminder of what the little folk are all about. This will ultimately give way to a stark depiction of shattered innocence.
Dominic Monaghan was by chance the first member of the cast I ever interviewed. He was in London in the summer of 2001, keen to press ahead with publicity, consciously hip in leather wristbands and torn jeans, a threadbare band t-shirt. He told mystical, ‘living a dream’ stories of a shoot that had changed his life, quite different from Merry in person.
He had been born in Berlin to English parents, a peripatetic infancy that ended in Stockport, an outer farthing of Greater Manchester. That was his vibe: salt-of-the-streets Mancunian, pretentiously unpretentious and a stalwart United fan. A desire to act had guided him to local theatre and a local agent. The twenty-three-year-old Monaghan was by no means green when he auditioned: he had spent four years as the trusty sidekick on amateur sleuth show Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
When the canny London casting director John Hubbard spoke to him about The Lord of the Rings, he was playing a skinhead on the London stage. Hubbard was managing the London end of casting with his wife Ros, and Monaghan went in to read for Frodo. It was a common feature of Jackson’s casting odyssey that he would discover someone he liked reading the wrong lines. Ordesky remembers Orlando Bloom trying out for Frodo, but everyone else, including Bloom, is certain he had first been up for Faramir.
‘It was a very relaxed process and I thought it went rather well,’ recalled Monaghan during our interview. He had been in France working on Second World War drama Monsignor Renard when he got his fateful call. ‘My agent told me they were interested in me for Merry and that I might have to go to Los Angeles or New Zealand in a couple of days to meet with Peter Jackson.’
That was just sinking in when his agent called back. There was no need to worry — he had already been cast. It was a late decision. Monaghan had a week back in England before getting on a plane to New Zealand.
‘It was one of those few moments when you’re acutely aware of your life turning on a right angle.’
He viewed Merry as a kind of exasperated older brother to the prattling Pippin: smarter, less carefree, but with no suspicion of what lay ahead. There was a satisfying transformation in the role. Merry ends up going to war. ‘No hobbit had ever been to war,’ declared Monaghan as we parted.
At thirty-one, Billy Boyd was the eldest of the quartet of hobbit actors, even though Pippin was supposedly the youngest. It didn’t show: Boyd caught his naïf qualities — how he totters unaware into peril, strained concentration etched onto his face. Pippin became a hero to those in the audience struggling to assemble all the threads of Tolkien’s epic tapestry. But, by film three, Pippin’s naiveté has been put out like a light.
Born in Easterhouse, Glasgow, Boyd’s soft regional brogue was echoed in a fine singing voice that Jackson would put to use. The actor even wrote ‘The Steward of Gondor’, the song he mournfully sings in The Return of the King. He came to acting via bookbinding (he actually bound copies of The Lord of the Rings) and a period, he jokes, of finding himself in the Florida Keys, before returning to attend The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, a conservatoire no less, in Glasgow.
With only a hatful of TV appearances and low-budget films, he read for both Merry and Pippin at the Hubbards’ behest, and a tape duly wended its way back to New Zealand. A month later, Jackson and Walsh were in London and asked to meet Boyd specifically about Pippin. There Jackson directed him through a makeshift scene: ‘Merry and Pippin sneaking up to Frodo’s window and seeing him with the Ring, that sort of idea.’
The first of the four hobbits to be cast, Jackson liked the contrast Boyd’s accent might offer. He also sensed audiences would like him. Boyd was a class clown, but sensitive too. He was grounded in person. Not only was Jackson looking for actors and actresses capable of filling the roles, he had to judge their temperament. Were they going to disrupt his way of working?
The Scots and Kiwis share that innate suspicion that acting and filmmaking might all be a bit daft.
Boyd had been busy with a theatre workshop in Edinburgh when he got a message to call his agent back. During a break he found a phone box. Then he heard the familiar voice of his agent saying unfamiliar words.
‘Guess who’s playing Pippin in The Lord of the Rings?’
He spent the rest of the afternoon calling her back to see if it was still true. Eventually she advised him to go and lie down.
As if preordained by the script, Monaghan and Boyd would become great friends. Yet it came naturally: they liked the same things, laughed at the same things, already teasing one another. Art and life were happily sharing. On the day they met, Boyd and Monaghan had drifted into Wellington for a coffee. Even then, the town had more coffee shops per capita than anywhere else in the world.
‘We asked each other for our stories,’ recalled Monaghan, ‘and what we’d been up to.’ They were just sitting there, Merry and Pippin, like a couple of regular fellas.
Frodo and Sam, however, remained a challenge.
As written, Frodo doesn’t actually do much of what might be classified as movie-type heroism. More often than not he ends up on the wrong end of something pointy. There was an air of martyrdom about him. He carried this unimaginable burden to which he was slowly surrendering like a vampire. He was completely unironic, and there was a danger of making him holier than thou. ‘He is also very hard to visualize,’ stresses Jackson, who spent a lot of time stressing over the conundrum. ‘Even more complex when you think that Tolkien made him the narrator of the book.’
In the two-film script, in an effort to invigorate Frodo, Jackson and Walsh introduced an extended sequence on the Seeing Seat relocated from Amon Hen to the Emyn Muil. Here Frodo gains a vision of Gandalf confronting Saruman, before a Ringwraith mounted on a fell beast swoops up behind the evil wizard and swipes him from the summit of Orthanc with a giant mace. With Gandalf