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Orlando Bloom

The Lord of the Rings

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Orlando Bloom:

Orlando Bloom, who makes his feature film debut as the elf Legolas, was a victim of an all-out assault. "They broke into his hotel room in the middle of the night," Monaghan chuckled. "They carried him downstairs. Billy and I sat on Orlando's knees and Sean Bean pulled his arms back. Viggo pulled up Orlando's shirt and slapped the hell out of his belly. "He was nearly crying, the poor baby." Bloom interjected: "It's all very affectionate. We were all in it together. "If we got bored, tired or grumpy somebody would slap you around the head and say "get a grip'."

Orlando Bloom, in his first major movie role, said there was a friendly off-the-set rivalry between the younger stars and American actor Mortensen. They would play practical jokes on each other. Mortensen, who plays the human Aragorn, got his son to cover Bloom's trailer in duct tape. In revenge, rotten fish "and a pile of fake s***" were left in Mortensen's trailer, Bloom said.

One day, I did the highest bungee jump in New Zealand. Five times in the space of half an hour! I knew the producers wouldn't be too pleased about it so I only told them afterwards."

We were doing this scene with 30 horses lined up. We had to shoot, like, five takes. We had to ride up over this mound and down into a gully; and then there were rocks and a sheer drop. Well, horses are pack animals, man. And when that many horses get going, they're really going. On the last take, the director said, 'Now imagine the Orcs [ogre-like monsters] coming up from behind.' So I had my bow up, but the horses just weren't going to stop. Gimli fell, he landed on top of me, and I landed on a rock. I cracked a rib and Vig cracked his tooth.

One night, me and Gimli stayed up all night. We'd been working till about 11pm, and we wanted to get the red dawn in the morning. So we stayed up. We brought our trailers around in a circle, like covered wagons, and lit a campfire in the middle, where we cooked sausages. And we stayed up the whole next day.

Vig used to call me 'Elf boy', and I'd call him 'filthy human'. As an Elf, I never got a scratch on me, never got dirty. And Vig would come out with blood and sweat all over him. And he'd say to me, 'Oh, go manicure your nails.'

I took a car trip down towards the South Island with Sean Bean. We were filming down there, but Sean's not into flying. And as we were driving, torrential rain started pouring down. You've never seen so much rain. I was videoing it and thinking, 'This is insane.' It didn't stop for, like, 12 hours. And after nine hours of heavy rain, the roads just started to wash away. Then we saw a massive landslide coming right towards us. We spun the car around, but we ran straight into another one, further up the road. So we pulled into this petrol station where there was already a queue of people. And we managed to find a little cottage, where they let us stay. They had to carry us out in a helicopter, in all this torrential rain, which was kind of hairy. Sean was gutted. He'd done this whole drive just to avoid the flight.

It really became my home. It was amazing, like the most beautiful parts of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales all put together on one tiny island; mountains, plains, rolling fields and s***-loads of sheep. And when you're thrown together on such a project, you have no choice but to make friends for life.

It was quite amusing to see the cast on a night off in Wellington. The Hobbits would be picking their feet, and the Elves would be picking their ears.

I had to train pretty extensively to get fluidity and the kind of grace and ease of movement that distinguishes an Elf. Training with the bow and arrow was a great way to find my character. I got pretty good. At the end, my archery instructor would throw a paper plate into the air, and I could nail it with an arrow.

Elijah Wood:

"I bow down to Viggo. He came in and saved the day. A lot of things would happen on this film where a certain amount of trouble would arise, and then something would come along where it would not only solve it, but would seem like fate, like it was meant to be. And Viggo was one of those cases. …Someone just mentioned his name, they called him, he came and it was perfect. He was meant to play Aragorn, he is Aragorn."

Oh, I love it! It's just so beautiful, so laidback and relaxed. People are so friendly. They don't have any airs about them. There's a bit of a bohemian lifestyle in Wellington that I really dug. The locals became very used to us and brought us right into their culture. They loved us. It was great -- we had our local haunts where we went to all the time. People probably assume that the locals were bothering us all the time, but not at all. Initially they may have been in awe, but the novelty wore off. Eventually they were just like, "Oh, Lord of the Rings? Cool. How's it going?"

Obviously, they were injuries here and there. We were constantly getting cuts. But Sean Astin had multiple stitches in his foot after a branch got stuck in it. Viggo went surfing with us once and the surf board hit him in the face, so the next day he went to Peter with this big black eye. He also got his tooth knocked out as well.

It was amazing. And it was so much more amazing than it was difficult. But the truth of the matter is that it was one of the most difficult experiences of anyone’s life. I’ve never felt so tired in my life, and the things that were asked of us—physically, mentally, emotionally, constantly—were really extreme. But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter because we were so passionate about what we were a part of.

I lived in Willington. We all had our own places. I had my own house. Dom (Dominic Monaghan) had an apartment. Viggo, (Mortensen) I think end up having a house. Billy (Boyd) had one of my favorites because he lived in town just up a hill that overlooked the town. It had an amazing view of the city. Orlando (Bloom) had a place right on the ocean.

The fellowship became a reality. We made some of the best friends of our lives. We went through ups and downs together as a single unit. I learned how to surf -- we all learned how to surf. We took vacations together. It was so special and profound.

We were all like little dealmakers. We were constantly walking around trying to figure out if they we’re going to show the feet or not. Most of the time we knew—we knew—they weren’t going to use them, and they would not admit it because they wanted to cover their ass. So constantly we’d come to them and say, “Look, they’re not going to be seen so can you just say they’re not going to be seen, so we can have an extra hour of sleep tomorrow?” And they’re like, “No, Peter doesn’t know what he’s gonna see in the shot.” Nine times out of 10 they wouldn’t agree with us, and we’d have to suck it up and put our feet on—and we would be right.

That was kind of weird. You have a Frodo running around with a mask on, but early on, they had faces that didn't move. So, it was just Frodo with this blank look, and I was like, 'Oh man!' I remember that we were on top of [a] mountain, and they had a box of the faces. I opened the box and there were these hobbit faces just looking up at me, sort of dead. It was bizarre.

We had six weeks of prep before the film, so we really got very close very quickly, which is just wonderful. And I've made friends for life, truly beautiful people, and they're perfectly cast. The first month, we were just doing Hobbit material, so it kinda felt like the Hobbit movie for a while! We were the four Hobbits, always together. But now they're breaking us up, and we're doing different parts of the film, so it's a bit weird, you know, because we spent so much time together initially.

I hadn't met Sean before. I met him about four or five days before I flew to New Zealand for the first time. He was getting his wig fitted, as I needed to get mine fitted. I went to this hotel, and we kind of crossed paths in the lobby. Obviously we both knew who [the] other was. And we kind of stopped and looked at each other, and we just ran and gave each other a massive hug—and that was the first time I ever met him. It was this instant connection because we knew what we were about to embark on together.

Dom Monaghan:

I won't miss having to stand for two hours at 4:30 a.m. and having freezing cold glue applied to my feet. I won't miss two-hour drives to work or long, long, long, days sitting in my trailer waiting... waiting... waiting. I won't miss glue in my ears. But I would do it all again tomorrow.

We're brothers, you know, I was thinking about this a few days ago. I was having a shave and I was thinking about the boys. I'm kind of a believer in reincarnation and that stuff, and I feel I cannot have made these friendships by chance. I feel we've met each other before and it was our destiny to come together, like it's destiny of the characters to come together. I have a brother, and these guys are close to me as any brother could be. We laughed and we cried and we went through hell together. But, we also had some incredibly fun times. Hobbits are very positive people, and that's how we behaved on set. We tried to bring people up and make them feel good, because that's what hobbits are like. It was an incredible experience. It just changed all of us. It was like being in The Beatles, you know.

Well we're just brothers you know. I have one real brother, but I have nine people who I would call my brothers. We spent about 15 hours a day seven days a week with each other. We fought and we laughed and we cried we went through every single level of emotion. You are doing things that we will never do with anyone ever again. We flew into storms in planes and having to land in airports at three in the morning and going up in helicopters, flying over whales and dolphins, and bungee jumping and surfing. It was life experiences. We all just became very close and relied on each other for support. It's strange because if you imagined that you were working with these people six days a week you would have thought that on your one day off you would say I'll see you tomorrow, go home and watch movies, but we wouldn't. We'd all go for breakfast together we would all go out. Even since finishing - it's been a year - I speak to one of the guys at least every other day. I know where they all are and where they are working so that in itself was a reason to do the movie.

(Talking about impersonation) I did Pete Jackson, Orlando, Elijah, Viggo, Billy, Ian McKellen. But the best one I did is Karin Shah, Elijah's size double. I impersonated his voice and called the producers pretending to be him, and Pete loved it.

We all had such a great time together, and we wanted something to remember the experience. At first, we talked about a ring, and then we got on to the tattoo. It became a group project. We rang up this guy who had a tattoo parlor that was closed on Sunday--our only day off--so we convinced him to open up for us, and we had a real party, taking photos of each other and everything

Billy Boyd:

I loved The Goonies, and The Ice Storm for Elijah. One time coming back to New Zealand from England, I was in a hotel and jet-lagged and forgot I'd asked Sean to get me a copy of Rudy because I never saw it. And I was in tears at 4 in the morning! I called him Rudy for months after that.

The rain came through so you were walking around in puddles of cold water. I remember doing one night shoot when my feet have never felt so uncomfortable. I was almost in tears. It was quite a relief when they called a wrap.

Sean Astin:

I had so many embarrassing moments while filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy. One of the worst is from the third movie. I was sitting in Rivendell, an elf paradise, and an 80-pound wooden prop fell and landed on my head. The crew raced over and picked the thing off my head and I came to. A lump started growing, and the wig that was glued to my head lifted up and started pulling off. I got a CAT scan and luckily, I had no brain damage. The neurologist said I had a very large brain, though. I'm proud about that.

When I agreed to do fifteen months making LOTR, I don't think I really understood what an awesome commitment of time it was. While we were making the movie, I read 40 books and Elijah Wood and I probably played 4000 hours of Sony Playstation. It was two birthdays for my daughter. The only way to describe the experience is how close people become, I imagine, when they're in the military overseas together -- that's how it felt for us.

Ian McKellen:

Pete wears the shorts! And he only owns two shirts. They're both pink. You can never be certain which one he's got on. But there's a lot of energy under there and willpower and ambition.

f I had been familiar with some of those movies I think I might have been less keen to join the band. But I think that making "Lord of the Rings" was an act of faith for a lot of people. The minute I got there I knew it was going to be all right. Ian Holm [who plays Bilbo Baggins] arrived he said, "What's it like? Is it going to be all right?" And I said, "You won't want to leave." And a month later he said, "I don't want to leave! I want to stay!"

As Gandalf, the Gray Wizard, I had this fight with Saruman, the White Wizard. Christopher Lee, who plays Saruman, points his staff at me, and I twist around on my shoulder with my legs in the air, on the ground. That was me. I achieved that with my legs in the air and a magnet keeping my shoulder on the ground. But just off the view of the camera was a chiropractor, an osteopath and a masseur.


Viggo Mortensen:

We had long battle sequences, I got a tooth knocked out, broken toes, and lots of cuts and sprains and pulled muscles. Everybody had something. When my tooth got knocked out, it was lunch time, so I went to the dentist, came back and we continued the scene after lunch. The action was pretty intense.

We'd have Sunday afternoon to do laundry and have a beer, and then before you knew it you were back on the battlefield.

Women go nuts over Viggo, but he's the kind of guy who never looks at himself. On the set, we each had a station with a big mirror. His was covered by pictures of his son and a photo collage of the crew. There wasn't one little speck left for him to look.

Pete counted on all the actors and the crew really bringing as much as they could to it. Rather than being somebody who was nervous over the budget and was like, 'Just do it. Just stand here,' Pete didn't do that. He was always looking for detail.

It was tough. All of a sudden somebody was over in the corner crying. Somebody [else] would go over and put their arm around them or take them for a walk. There was interaction between cast and crew. It was a complete team. It was, in a sense, a fellowship of thousands of people who traveled from place to place. I didn't always feel safe, in the sense that you'd just be diving into a scene where you're thinking, 'I don't know how we're going to pull this off right now. Here come the clouds. We get one crack at it.' At the end of the day, though, I always felt that there was a certain safety in the family we were a part of, in isolation from the rest of the world. I thought it was good that we shot, not in Europe, not in North America, but in this place that was different.

"We were travelling down by road from the top of the south island, from Wellington to Queenstown, and it's about a 10 hour journey, and it just happened that we had a lot of water...a lot of rainfall...and the road we were on was only a two lane road, and banks collapsed behind us and in front of us...and we were sort of stuck in this little place for a couple of days...me and Orlando Bloom.... We were on the phone a lot...wondering when a helicopter was going to come and take us out."

The honest truth is that I would have regretted not doing it. I had to decide immediately and get on the plane, and I knew that I would regret it if I hadn't done it. But what I didn't count on was how strong the bond would be with the cast and crew. Everybody was really wonderful. It's a lasting thing. That was an unexpected gift.

I was very sad to leave. In fact, I stayed on a little while afterward. I can't imagine that I would ever grow tired of the place or the people. I don't know. I can't describe it. And no matter where we were or how [difficult the shooting schedule was] we had a sense that we were all on an epic journey. That was palpable on a daily basis. You don't get that feeling very often on a movie set—and you certainly don't get it every day for a year and a half.

Sean Bean:

The 42-year-old Brit met director Peter Jackson for the first time in a hotel in London. "The room was incredibly small, and I was reading a scene from the script where I try to steal the ring from Frodo. And I sat there in the chair in the hotel room and tried to enact the role, but it was such a physical scene and hard to do in there... so when I later left the room I felt like 's***, I could have done that a lot better'. But I obviously did something right, since I got the part."

They sucked so much power out of you, physically as well as mentally. Mostly physically. We fought with snow and ice cold water in the winter, and heat in the summer, always wearing heavy equipment, carrying sword and shield during long battle scenes. You fed off the adrenaline.

We were shooting a lot at night, and the scene where we fight the serpent in the water, that was really hard. That was tough because it was really cold in New Zealand at the time - it was winter and the water wasn't heated and we were in our costumes for a night shoot that went 12 or 14 hours. That was tough. That was really tough. I thought I was going to be required the following evening and I was like 'Oh God, I've got to do it again in that f**king cold.' But then I got a call saying, 'Hey Sean, it looks like we might not need you tonight. We're going to do this digitally. 'I thought, 'Oh, that's great.' But I think just the sheer excitement and thrill of being involved in such a thing just carried you through the days when you're tired. It's only afterwards, when I was finished and had gone home to England, that it just hit me and I felt exhausted.

I left the set three months before the others, which felt strange. I wanted to be with them in the fantasy world, not stuck in traffic in England. It was quite an anticlimax.

We spent a whole year of our lives together. We learned to socialise and accept other people from different backgrounds, as we do in the Fellowship in the film. We all used to go out together, and then the hobbits would break off and play pool. If I wasn't hanging out with all the guys in the Fellowship, I'd hang out with Viggo Mortensen. You could say he was my best friend on the film.

Lord of the Rings was just so much enjoyment. It was over about the space of a year that I was filming. It's one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done...so emotional. Peter Jackson is an incredible director. He's very on top of things and thoroughly researched...and he knew exactly what he wanted and what was happening at any particular time on any set. He had a little bicycle so that he could peddle to the next set....

I'm not a very good flier, though I'm getting better. It's the turbulence which really gets me. Orlando and I decided to drive and take the ferry instead. The only problem was Orlando's propensity for shopping. He had to stop at every shop to get Christmas presents. It was pouring with rain, so I was saying: 'Look, we've got to get going or there's going to be a landslide'. And sure enough, there was. We turned back to find another one so we were stuck in the middle of nowhere. They sent a chopper to airlift us out - even worse than a Dakota! It was still raining and we were flying through mountain passes and the windscreen wipers were going like mad. I said: 'Can't you just drop us there in that field?', but they wouldn't. I was gripping Orlando's kneecap so hard I must have nearly broken it. He was saying: 'It's OK' but he still takes the piss out of me for that.

John Rhys-Davies:

(Talking about his fake beard) That piece of yak tail had a life of its own each day. After six months of it, I developed what is gleefully described as topical eczema. I sort of looked like a panda. It was red, raw and also swelled up.

Liv Tyler:

Recreating scenes in a sound stage, it wasn't so easy. I had to reproduce the same emotions and expressions as on a set. Creating and imagining the scenario in my head with the river, the sound of the water, the forest, was quite challenging. There were no real set built around me.

I think that a lot of that was the friendships that we made with each other and the fact that we all needed each other. It was vital that we all had each other to survive and to be able to laugh. Everybody had a really good sense of humor, thank God. We'd be constantly making jokes and decorating the trailer with ridiculous things and being rude and that was our sort of little bubble of escape in our makeup trailer.

I’ve never seen anybody in my whole life work as hard as Viggo Mortensen. The guy did not complain once. He never got a massage. He never took a day off. He just worked every second. Even on the days off, he’d go horseback riding or do something that was related.

It was good, but hard. I brought my girlfriend with me to be my assistant, so I spent a lot of time at home with her, hanging out when I couldn't take the boys anymore. Orlando Bloom lived next door and he took me around because I was afraid to drive on the left-hand side of the road. We all had houses. It was great. We really got to know each other. Our makeup trailer became the center of things. It was given a really bad name that I cannot repeat. There were pranks, most of them also too dirty to tell.

One of my most vivid memories is doing this horse chase in the beginning of film one. The Black Riders are chasing me—I think it's in the trailer. I was shooting a lot of stuff without anybody else there [just a blue screen so the special effects could be put in later]. I was so embarrassed, and I was having such a hard time imagining everything, and I was all crumbling inside. And when I was finished I went over to another stage and the boys were all doing something even more embarrassing [laughs]. There was some kind of explosion and they were all jumping. It put me at ease. It helped me get over myself and not be so uptight.

When I arrived, the boys had all been there for a month so it was weird. Well, it wasn't weird, but they had already established this really intense bond and I was immediately invited into that and treated with extra nice boy treatment. But you know, just by the nature of who their characters are, all being part of the fellowship, it was important that they all had that bond together.

Peter Jackson:

Summoning descriptive powers worthy of Tolkien himself, director Peter Jackson takes a shot at describing each of his main The Lord of the Rings cast members in a word or two:

Ian McKellen (Gandalf). "Naughty"

Elijah Wood (Frodo). "Wonderful"

Sean Astin (Sam). "Joker"

Dominic Monaghan (Merry). "More naughty"

Billy Boyd (Pippin). "Even naughtier"

Ian Holm (Bilbo). "A pleasure"

Liv Tyler (Arwen). "Beautiful"

Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn). "Brave"

Cate Blanchett (Galadriel). "Serene"

Sean Bean (Boromir). "A gentleman"

John-Rhys Davies (Gimli). "An experience"

Christopher Lee (Saruman). "Great fun"

Orlando Bloom (Legolas). "Passionate"

Peter Jackson told the story of how Bloom and some of the hobbit actors had lured non-surfer Viggo Mortensen into action. Mortensen had shown up for work ready for shooting in the mines of Moria with "a huge swollen face, his right eye closed like a boxer", after a knock from his surf board. "For the scene we had to always shoot from the left-hand side," Jackson said. "We had no choice."

I think everybody, when they read a book they really like, imagines the perfect cast for the film. We got to do that for real. It fell into two categories, really. There were the actors we imagined from the very beginning--Ian McKellen, Ian Holm, Sean Bean. Then there's the roles where we wanted an unknown and found someone like Orlando Bloom, who plays Legolas. And then there's someone like Elijah Wood. We thought Frodo would be an unknown English actor. But he sent us an audition tape where he dressed up in this really cheesy hobbit costume and hired a dialect coach for the accent. When I saw the tape, I knew instantaneously I had found Frodo.

Barry Osbourne:

He (Aragorn)'s incredibly dedicated. He's the kind of actor who one day had his tooth knocked out by a sword and actually asked if they could superglue it back on so he could finish the scene. He became Aragorn.

Miranda Rivers (Casting Director):

The stress was huge. It was absolutely huge. Especially when you’re doing night shoots and they completely change what kind of characters are due and you’ve got all these people lined up and you’ve got six hours to find another hundred people ... We had a huge filing systems of people who were interested. We had A-list people who we’d ring first off and then B-list and then C-list and D-list and E-list—and by then it was like, “So, have you got a cousin? Have you got a friend? Have you got anyone?” By the end, we had a sign on the door that I liked: IF YOU’RE BREATHING, YOU’RE BOOKED. I don’t know how we did it, but we always pulled it off.

You used the New Zealand army at some points? Yes. We used them for a whole lot of battle scenes. The army are another kettle of fish altogether because they are trained to kill. They were trying to kill each other with our fake rubber props. But you ask those guys to march, and they know how to march. By the end, we were just these casting machines. It also became a gag for us. We had no personal lives anymore. We would walk down the street, and people were not people, they were types: I'd be going, 'Hobbit!' 'Elf!' 'Uruk-hai!' 'Rohan!' I got a lot of elves off the street

I think the logistics of trying to shoot with so many [camera] crews. Also New Zealand's weather is really up and down. We had all kinds of extremes. I remember one day we were in Queenstown and we were sunburned from the day before because it had been sunny and we'd all been in hats and sunscreen. And then the next day it started snowing. We were sunburned and it was snowing!

You have no idea what I've seen. People knew they had a very short time to impress, so I had the guy in the green tights playing the bag pipes. I had the man with the scroll talking to me only in elfish when I only wanted to know his name. I had the guy who sat at the piano playing me all this music and wouldn't leave. I had the gothic with the black hair and the full body piercing trying to be just involved somehow. I said, "Would you be willing to take out your piercing?" And they took offense at that. They wanted to know, "Why?! What's wrong with it? Why can't I be who I am?!" I'm like, "This is Middle-earth." I saw all types.

What was most interesting for me was that each character started to take on personality traits. People who were cast as hobbits were chatterboxes. You put 100 people who you've cast as hobbits together and getting them to be quiet is a major feat. You put a bunch of elves together and you find no one's eating and there's a lot of whinging [complaining] and there's a lot of hair and makeup required. It became a running joke with us. The people who played Uruk-hai, which are the mean 6-foot fighting machines—they actually had this rivalry on set with the elves. They'd call them cupcakes. Because I can guarantee you, if you put the Uruk-hai out there, they'll last all night with no complaining. You put the elves out there and within a couple of hours they'll be going, "I'm too tired! And I need more makeup!" Hobbits were cast by large round eyes and big rosy cheeks. Our favorite adjective became roundy. "Are they roundy?" Round tummies, round cheeks, round eyes.

General:

During the New Zealand-based production, a group of wax-head hobbits, led by Elijah Wood, became surf fanatics who spent their downtime shooting the curl off the rugged coastline. Mortensen, who plays the sword-wielding Aragorn, joined them one weekend—but instead of clocking time in the green room he wound up banging his head after his board flipped up and hit him in the face. The following Monday, Mortensen showed up to shoot the Mines of Moria scenes with the right side of his face badly swollen and his right eye shut like a punch-drunk boxer's. When make-up artists couldn't cover the bruising, Jackson was forced to shoot Mortensen only from his left side.