Secrets from Lord of the Rings cast finally spill out: Night of gay abandon when even straight actors joined in… and how 'cocky' Orlando Bloom couldn't help himself among the local women

Even 25 years after the release of The Lord of the Rings, the extraordinary movie trilogy continues to throw up surprises.

Stories about the making of the multi-Oscar-winning series have become almost as legendary as the JRR Tolkien books they were based on, and fans passionately debate the veracity of the tall tales on dedicated Reddit threads and social media posts.

Did Viggo Mortensen really break his toe when kicking a helmet during filming of The Two Towers? Yes, he did. And his scream of agony in the aftermath even made the final cut.

Did Sean Connery secretly film a cameo after regretting turning down the role of Gandalf the wizard? No, he did not. Though he did famously refuse the role, saying he 'didn't understand the script.'

But given that the principal cast spent the better part of three years in New Zealand – giving the set more of a carnival atmosphere than a normal film production – there's at least one book's worth of anecdotes about the pranks, high jinks and clashes of ego that happened behind the scenes.

As a film and TV journalist, I interviewed around 100 cast and crew for my new oral history of the series, There and Back Again, and uncovered many unheard, unknown and long forgotten stories about how these films were made.

Gangster rap and gay bars 

The bonds between cast members extended beyond the set.

Virtually every pub and nightclub in Wellington, New Zealand, got a merry going over by the guys, with Dominic Monaghan – the young British actor who played Hobbit 'Merry' Brandybuck – often taking over DJing duties until 2am or 3am on more than one occasion.

Ian McKellen (Gandalf) may have been one of the older cast members, but he was often in attendance, asking Monaghan to play some gangster rap.

Monaghan says: 'After a few months of that happening, 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 would like it if you would come and hang out with my friends and see the life that I'm living."'

'We were kinda iffy on it. Like, "Yeah, not really our scene, but we'll do it."'

'We went one Friday night, myself, Billy [Boyd, who played Pippin], Elijah [Wood, who played Frodo], Orlando [Bloom - Legolas the elf], and Sean [Astin - Samwise Gamgee], and I guess we weren't quite sure if we were going to fit in that well.

'Billy tells a great story that he went to get a drink at the bar and he turns around and sees me and Orlando standing on a table with our shirts off waving them around. We had a great night.'

Viggo goes full Method

Drafted in at the last minute after Peter Jackson made the 11th-hour call to replace Irish actor Stuart Townsend, Viggo Mortensen, who knew nothing of Lord of the Rings before being cast as Aragorn, quickly embedded himself with the large cast and crew.

Particularly the stunt crew.

As stunt man and Sauron actor Sala Baker explains: 'Viggo was such a dude. A total Method actor. He'd turn up, he'd have no shoes on. He's just got a scabbard and a sword, and he has his sword on him at all times.'

Such was the intensely physical nature of the large-scale battle scenes, injuries were not uncommon, with Mortensen opting to soldier through a gnarly knock to the mouth.

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.'

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.'

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.'

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.' 

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.

'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.