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Actors Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd reveal that director Peter Jackson faced serious studio pressure to kill off one of the four Hobbits.
Director Peter Jackson faced a lot of pressure from the studio to kill one of the Hobbits in his Lord of the Rings trilogy.
While speaking with IGN to promote their podcast, The Friendship Onion, Lord of the Rings stars Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd revealed that producers at New Line Cinemas tried to convince Jackson to kill off one of the four Hobbits in Return of the King, the final film in the trilogy. This is despite the fact that all the Hobbits survived in the original Lord of the Rings books by J.R.R. Tolkein. Monaghan and Boyd played Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck and Peregrin “Pippin” Took, respectively, while Elijah Wood and Sean Astin starred as Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee.
“It’s a good job that didn’t happen, because it would have been me,” Monaghan said. “It definitely would have. There’s no way they are killing Frodo and Sam, and the only ones that would be left would be Merry and Pippin. They wouldn’t kill Pippin because Pippin has a really strong story with Gandalf. It would have definitely been me. I think Pete quite rightly was like, ‘This is a luminary piece of written work, and we need to stick close to the text.’ So, he stuck by his guns. Yeah, I’m thankful that didn’t happen.”
Along with the almost-murder of one of the Hobbits, Merry and Pippin were almost the stars of a nude scene featuring Treebeard, which they revealed while appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Boyd and Monaghan were asked about the possibility of the upcoming LOTR Amazon television adaptation reaching Game of Thrones levels of maturity, despite fans who have petitioned that there be absolutely no nudity in the television adaptation.
“Here’s the thing, there was almost nudity in the [Lord of the Rings] movies,” Boyd said, referencing a joke scene written by co-screenwriter Philippa Boyens. “She did a gag, and she wrote a scene — because we’d been kind of doing some gags and winding people up, having a bit of fun — and she wrote a scene, that she said, ‘Oh, it’s a new scene we’re filming next week, with the Ents, with Treebeard. So when Merry and Pippin are up Treebeard, he gets a fright and shakes his branches, which makes you guys fall’ – and this has all been printed on this script – ‘it makes you guys fall, and as you hit all the branches on the way down, by the time you hit the ground, you’re naked. And Merry turns to Pippin and says, ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ And Pippin says, ‘Hold me, Merry.'”
Season 1 of the Lord of the Rings TV series began in Feb. 2020 and is currently still filming. The series will be set in the Second Age of Middle-earth’s history, thousands of years before the events of the original Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.
Source: IGN
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