It’s been almost two decades since Lord of the Rings first hit theatres and we’re still getting new information from the set of the film. In this case, one of the movie lead stars explained the inspiration between one of the movie’s most disgusting and evil villains.
During an episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Elijah Wood who played Frodo Baggins in the trilogy of film adaptions for J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic books explained that the mask used for an Ork in the first Lord of the Rings film was modeled after disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein.
“It’s funny, this was recently spoken about because Dom [Monaghan] and Bill [Boyd, who played hobbits Merry and Pippin] … were talking to Sean Astin [Samwise] about his first memory of getting to New Zealand [where the series was filmed]. He had seen the Orc Masks, and one of the orc masks – and I remember this vividly – was designed to look like Harvey Weinstein as a sort of a f—k you.”
Transcription via The Guardian
In May of 2018, Weinstein was arrested after countless accusations of sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape. More than 80 women from within the film industry came out with accusations against the film producer.
Following this arrest, in 2020 Weinstein was found guilty of rape in the third degree along with committing criminal sex acts and wound up being sentenced to 23 years in prison.
This imprisonment seemingly inspired Wood to share this story from the set of Lord of the Rings stating on the podcast, “The guy is fucking incarcerated. Fuck him.”
