Jed Brophy, actor, The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit - Interview

all right welcome everyone to nerd of the rings today we have a very special guest with us mr jed brophy you probably recognize him um from well any number of characters from middle earth uh just to name a few we've got nori obviously from the hobbit snaga sharku those uh some of the most quotable orcs in um why can't we have somebody what about them they're fresh that's why my sons absolutely love that part they love the voice everything about it that's why it's in the movie it's just for the kids yeah yeah the uh works eating the habits that's the absolutely it's actually a metaphor for getting kids to eat the vegetables oh there we go yeah so uh in addition to those i was curious so i i know you're also a writer of rohan um you you've got a speaking line in the extended edition of two towers yeah and they find theodrid um with the fort zweisen and then you're an elf during the scene where uh arwen has the vision right and you also played in nas ghoul i did both on the both on um horseback and also one of the foul beasts there were three of us that played those characters we're actually riding a barrel but looking menacing yeah menacing menacing isn't easy in black cloth you really have to work it so you actually so by the time the barrel scene in the hobbit came around you were like i've already done this barrel thing yeah because the wag that i wrote in the two towers was also a barrel rocked by six different people in all these different directions so there's a lot of barrel writing done as probably playing tribute to um bilbo's barrel riding from the hobbit that's right and also sometimes during the big gallops with the horses um sometimes uh for the close-ups that have an actor on the barrel right on the tracking vehicle as it sped down the road with all the horses galloping beside so yet another barrel man i never knew that there were so many barrels involved in lord of the rings who knew that's good that you had the practice though so you were probably the best one when it came to the hobbit then i didn't say anything i didn't describe about it but it was clearly true if you see my trajectory down the river it's you're a pro by that time absolute pro the other dwarves didn't talk to me about it but you could tell they were jealous oh for sure yeah well we used to stephen hunter yeah i was gonna say we had stephen hunter on and he didn't mention the barrels a whole lot and i think it's probably because you know he got stuck yeah he got stuck did he tell you that he got stuck in the barrel i think that way yeah yeah that that actually made it into the film too right a couple of them helped out the barrel yeah yeah yeah it was tricky so what um am i missing anything in that list was there was there were you are there's a there's the which there's the witch kings the witch kings dresser and uh i think it's in the third film um and various other various other orcs as well um but yeah in a gondola night we did the gallop towards and from australia with theramare and that condorion knight so yeah there's a few characters in there i was lucky because i was one of the full-time i'm one of the 20 also full-time horse trainers for a while on it and um got to do those big gallops and you know got to buy a horse at the end of it one of the rohan horses which i still have he's 24 now he's seb yeah he's he's in the paddock where we actually filmed the mama kill attack um outside uh the gates of minnesota um the rohan yeah riding and shooting up at them so yeah that was cool very cool yeah we we got to meet seb and uh i i got a little cameo from you for my uh patreon supporters and yeah you were out you're out hanging out with seb and i yeah i appreciate you even did a uh a voice for seb i appreciate that as well yeah he's uh he's been a film star for quite some time go ahead i know you guys um i i was gonna move on to the next topic so if you if you've got okay um so with that you know knowing you've played all kinds of people in middle earth i'll pop up questions here once in a while so um one of the most common questions i got asked when i was asking for people's questions is which middle-earth race is the most fun to play look i'm going to offend all the races here aren't i i'm going to have i'm going to have my dwarven brethren bringing me and my orc brethren ringing me it's going to be a bad day for me um i don't i couldn't really say they were all so much fun i never thought i'd get to play such a wide variety so yeah i always kind of pinch myself but i think i think in terms of pure joy probably those rohan gallopers because at full speed on the horse with 300 other horses there's nothing quite as exciting yeah that was probably the most fun but having said that the dwarves that was an amazing experience being part of a company like i was very envious of the of the fellowship those people in the actual fellowship who got to spend all that time together because i got to work with some of them peripherally but not full-on and full-time but i did with the dwarves and so being part of that dwarven company i think was i think that would be hard to beat yeah so the dwarves the doors are kind of scrappy they're kind of naughty yeah they they're really um you know they know they were made first and then put back to sleep and they don't like being called ugly or stunted and so they have a lot to um a lot to endear them to an actor getting to play them fantastic and uh looks like we just had our uh first super chat from carnivales and panama um excellent says hi jed you are amazing love your part as the orc and lord of the rings and then she uh he or she added they look fresh they do look fresh yeah so uh so if you hadn't seen the pin comment everybody um so i was talking with jed before this and said you know i'd like to uh i think it'd be cool if we donated all super chats to something so i let jed pick he picked uh frontline uh healthcare workers so all super chats are going to be going uh to benefit uh frontline healthcare workers so thank you thank you everybody so your uh your previous comment actually leads me into um into the next question um so you you mentioned the fellowship and you're kind of jealous you know in that first trilogy how tight they all got um and you know bonded um so one of my patreon supporters uh soapy asks how close were you with the core cast of the hobbit and do you all still stay in touch we do when we can um the thing about that company some of them have gone on to become incredibly fabulous international film stars and and we don't see each other all that often but i see graeme mctavish probably once every couple of months and he and i did an amazing job together this time last year with a company from utah called icon fitness i mean um ifit we got to do some of the great walks of new zealand and i still see my kiwi cohorts peter hamilton and john callan and keep in touch with adam brown and yeah we we pretty much all try and keep in touch at least once a year but it is it is a um an amazing thing that we got to do that with each other absolutely yeah it's a bit like going to war you know in terms of although that's a bad analogy for making films i guess but you you form a really tight-knit bond because it's quite hard work sometimes and there's a lot of camaraderie and that kind of gets you through the hard days yeah i mean long hours and it's a very long period of time as well especially on a production like the hobbit i mean yeah how long how long was the uh the total production time on that i think i i would think i was put into prosthetics 277 times wow so but i and i wasn't put in the most i think was probably richard and maybe um martin although he only had prosthetic feet the rest of them was just pure martin the years are the years yeah i forgot about the years actually yeah actual ears maybe they hide sherlock and stuff we're not supposed to say because marty's very thing about his ears but yeah i'm supposed to say anything it's just between you and me yeah i send it yeah and i can't chat with dino gorman too because i've done a few photo shoots helping dean out with his um he did a whole series of photos sort of based on themes from world war one from the from the front line from the trenches and we we dug a big trench up here in auckland and we had a whole lot of actors go there including my son dressed up in world war one uniforms and kind of recreating some of the big those big iconic photos people going over the top stretches being carried through and yes i've seen a bit of probably too much of dean actually he probably worked just a bit hard so um you you mentioned yourself was in uh return of the king as well right but both my sons had little bits on the film my my eldest boy he was um one of the hobbit children in the first film in the fellowship chasing gandolf's card and then being in the party scene and listening to the story and he was also a scale double when he was little enough he was exactly the right height and they used to put little prosthetic faces on them to play whoever they were playing so yeah he did some cool stuff on that yeah and then my my youngest son he got to be aragorn and irwin's future son the future king of gondor as he likes to tell people yeah it's uh um i always wonder you know how much uh visual effects like his eyes in that scene like they're just so i don't know like it's like he's piercing into your soul a little bit like does he does he naturally have that look or you know at least when he was that age or you know how much of that is uh effects no that's that's pure direction he he was um he was only five years old and we arrived on set quite early the day that they did that close up and peter was directing and andrew lisney the wonderful great andrew lisney was the cinematographer and when he came on set and andrew was there and he said to him do you know what you're doing and seven was like oh i don't really know and he said he put him up on the dolly and he got him to look through the lens and he showed him the camera move moving in and then turning the corner and seeing aragorn turn and see him and run into his arms and turn around to the camera yeah and andrew said to him and you would you know you'll do your acting face and you'll think about mummy leaving and then you'll be all sad and then she'll cry something to that effect yeah and so that when peter came in he actually asked him he said do you know what you're doing he said oh yeah i'm going to run into viggo's arms and i will giggle or something and then i'll do my acting face and she will cry and peter was like yeah that's pretty much it and then just kind of talked him through thinking about his own mother you know the times when um he's been wanting to stay with her and then she has to go just that thought of please don't go and with children they can actually hold that thought probably better than adults because there's no artifice you're not they're not thinking about the character they're playing they're just holding on to that one kind of single emotion that they've been given yeah um yeah and and that i think from memory i think that is take one i think that's the original the very first one that they showed that's so cool yeah i i thought of that you know when uh when i started thinking back of all the roles you played i was like oh yeah you know his kids are in there and uh like ever ever since i've had kids myself you know i originally saw the films back before i had kids but since having kids like that look is even more you know just kind of cuts you right to the core yeah it does yeah it's a wonderful moment in the film and really cool for him i think he was six he didn't go to the red carpet not with us he went with some friends of ours we didn't know he wasn't meant to be at the red carpet for the premiere um they thought maybe we thought maybe he was a bit young at six but we went to the cast and crew screening and when that moment came on you know just the kind of he remembered everything about that day he had a great time working with both viggo and liv i mean who what a lucky kid who gets there who who are the people that you've worked with are bigger more tense and just just a couple people yeah not bad for your your first go around i guess yeah yeah and largely unaffected by it too you know but he has he's he's managed to get a little bit of travel out of it and go and kind of go to a few conventions and talk about that experience it's hard because he was five minutes it's hard to really remember kind of what it was like you're that young yeah for sure well we just got another super chat um thank you took a friend of the channel um love the conversation happy to donate you've brought much joy and then there's some some cheers emojis so thank you so the next question um you mentioned prosthetics actually um this brings me to my question um so uh and you could refer to both you know your time in lord of the rings and the hobbit so do the prosthetics help you get into character or is it distracting i always envisioned it as you know when you're made up like an orc like you look in the mirror and like bam you know that that helps you get into character but um i think i i listened on a recent podcast you talked about some you know sometimes it's really uncomfortable in the prosthetics as well yeah it's um you wouldn't you wouldn't do it if you uh if you thought that it was going to be 100 fun being stuck under rubber and the thing is that um you know the difference these days with silicon as the foam latex is foam latex was a lot harder to maintain it used to fray in what we call the blend joins you know where you've got maybe nine different separate pieces the chin piece the mouthpiece the nose piece forehead cheeks and then the ears keeping it separate like that you get a lot more subtlety in the movement you get more kind of light muscular control than just a kind of one whole piece um but blending those edges where they blend together with foam latex takes a lot of paint and a lot of expertise and a lot of touching up in between takes whereas silicon seems to it's a different it's got different properties to it and and i would be too you know a make-up artist would be more succinct about this but um they are quite heavy you do feel them on your face and you have to get used to that feeling of having it glued on and taken off every day and then there are lenses that go in your eyes and then there are the teeth that you have to wear and you have to make your mouth work around it so it's a it's something that goes piece by piece goes on the character starts to come and then once the paint works going on and you have the teeth in and you can kind of start to work it then you can kind of look and see what you do yeah it's it's an it's an exciting thing when the design is great you know it's those really like i knew with schnager when they painted me up that he was you know that he was um he was going to be a really cool orc to play yeah yeah he's definitely a one i think one of the uh most quotable um that whole scene you know yeah yeah nothing but maggoty bread for three stinky days yeah well i don't know if you know this but andy circus did all the adr for i think parts of that scene he played quite a few of the characters really yeah mimicking the wild track from what we did on the day because we were stuck in new zealand and they were already doing adr and abby road i think really for the premiere in the uk from memory that's kind of how it went but yeah i've seen an interview where he said he played quite a few of those characters just this the voice parts just i'm redoing the voice clean because you got you got people shouting and you got fans going off and oh yeah all of that sort of stuff so yeah huh interesting i didn't i didn't so so is uh is andy's voice are you talking like the background orcs or like no i think i think some of the foreground orcs as well yeah okay yeah he's a genie he's a genius um voice yeah he's amazing yeah he's phenomenal oh my gosh yeah like his uh his list of films that he's been in and done i'm like i haven't yet seen one that i don't absolutely love yeah i know and he's a good guy too you know he's one of those he's one of the nicest people in the industry very cool i always i always love hearing that you know when you like you see you see so many you know as a fan you see like featurettes and bonus features and stuff like that and you're like he seems like a cool guy so it's always nice to uh to get confirmation like yeah he's a cool guy yeah um so you mentioned uh some of your uh hobbit castmates um you know that you've uh worked with and been in contact um with you know since the filming you actually uh just recently had a film release that you start in with mark hadlow yeah moon yeah and i actually just watched it recently um and i absolutely loved it it was really good uh and um it was kind of cool initially you know because i still excuse me i still look at you guys i'm like oh yes nori and dory and um not on that phone for those of you with kiddos do not watch the movie with uh with your kiddos in the room um but uh yeah so what was it like working with mark again and uh um on that film off the record it was terrible but on the record i loved working with mark no he's great it was um it was an amazing project he brought it to me he'd been working with steph harris the director on um the script for another film that they were because they've done a few films together and we've done a kind of a little test shoot for it a thing called swansong but we weren't getting any traction and mark and steph had a conversation and i think mark suggested they just come up with something they could shoot on the phone and steph went away and wrote it and and not a very long time and then mark got in contact with me and said hey there's a script here called blue moon it's really good you should read it and i did and i loved the script i thought the script was fantastic and i have to admit i wasn't that sure about shooting on a phone to begin with but um we went down that december i think i got the script and maybe september october we went down in december and shot one night shot four scenes from it and i went oh this is going to be look looked at the footage of me yeah this is going to be cool it's going to be a cool film today let's go i i'm always curious you know there's been a a few film you know a handful of films that come out you know that kind of uh get some press because of the technology that you know the the on the low end you know you obviously you're like oh christopher nolan's using imax cameras and stuff but it's kind of cool to see on the other end where it's like oh they use the phone that you that are what you're walking around with in your pocket yeah and we and we shot it quick we shot it in 30 hours we only had six nights or five nights six or five hours a night so we didn't have enough we didn't have a lot of time to do lots of rehearsals and you know lots of blocking we um we had a really good dop and we had a lockdown location this one service station and so it kind of lent itself to that kind of in-your-face filming like having a person literally right there can be a bit disconcerting but we found it really liberating interesting yeah it's one of those films that uh you know it all takes place in a single location but it's not it wasn't till the end of the movie um where the location actually changed that i realized oh man this is the first yeah this is the second location of the movie yeah i know i know it's wild eh and again i you know we were lucky that we had that december to go down and check it out because it's all glass down one side so we can't we couldn't shoot anything in that direction because we just get the reflection of the the boom one of the one of the things about shooting on a phone is you realize you need really good sound and we had a great sound guy who down worked on films for um quentin tarantino back in the day and he had all his own sound gear and so we lucked into getting him uh come and be able to place mics around in places that could sort of be hidden so we could i think our longest take was 10 and a half nearly 11 minutes so being able to just have a camera move with you and sort of get out of your way there was a little bit of kind of planning that we had to do yeah but yeah it's it's a real character-driven film and um great to work with someone that i know so well yeah the thing mark and i could we could improvise a bit of stuff we could go off script a bit um not a lot but certainly it had that organic feel that we weren't being rushed there was no kind of timing the timing was up to us really like like a better theater oh yeah i didn't even think about that yeah that's that's pretty cool so was the i'm always curious with these uh these iphone films you know um uh like what what the other factors that go into making a film you know like like you mentioned the audio you know you discover you need to have really good audio what what was like the lighting like yeah that the problem when you get into that into a kind of changeable light at night when it's especially when you've got flickering lights outside we we the only shop we really struggled to keep light in was you'll know the one going across the forecourt and markers going across there with the trolley it sort of pixelates it's the only time it really does that yeah so so you do have to light it quite you know if you can do lots of pre-lighting if you can go and have a look at your space and then kind of work out where the patchy stuff is and and get some fill in there that you can hide yeah you can do okay stuff but there is a point at which it all kind of falls apart the moon the moon dog lenses and the motion lenses and the other companies that make those anamorphic lenses they turn it into widescreen 4k so the definition is great it's just a matter of making sure you have a lot of prep time and with your actors too the more time you can have pulling that script apart we broke it down into six sections knowing we had six nights and we just learnt that section so well mark and i that we could do it standing on our heads not in character we just learnt the lines and then once we got to set once we put the clothes on we would take five minutes and just drop into character and just start shooting and we just start shooting until it fell apart and then we'd sort of talk about how we can change it yeah and shoot the reverses and then go back and shoot it if we had to but i think there's maybe two only two shots in the whole film where it's a second take wow that's that's really cool yeah yeah that's awesome that you're able to get it in so few takes that's impressive you've got to have an experienced bunch of people and you know to do that it was it was drawing on all of the kind of film know-how of every department in terms of them being able to go away and have some time thinking about what we were going to do yeah like i say it was a clever script that was written to be shot in one location so it really helped us yeah yeah it's it's really cool like i said i really enjoyed it um i picked it up on uh on amazon i know right now just because i just did it recently i can tell you guys uh it's five bucks to buy it or five bucks to rent it so what you went ahead and buy it you should buy it yeah i don't know why you wouldn't um so it stars an evil moustache too like a real mustache yeah yeah you've got to watch it just for the moustache absolutely you do yeah and you've got the uh you know you've got the the sawed-off shotgun with like the holster thing i had to give it back that was said yeah now speaking of whit okay so this brings up something i actually didn't have this in my notes but when i was talking to stephen he someone asked him if he you know got any keepsakes from middle earth and he's this he said jed brophy probably stole the most stuff from from the hobbit set so you i don't you might get in trouble if you tell me everything you got from the sounds of it but is there is there anything in particularly you know cool that you have from from either time in middle earth but i'm working with some uh you know in this country you work with the same props people and the costume people and you work with them all the time so yes i did i did take some stuff [Laughter] i took a lot of pieces of gold it was really really i took some in the first take in troll shore when we're burying the gold i mean gimli and dwylan are having a conversation about money and me and someone else are burying the gold i was literally filling my boot up because it was all these gold pieces like every tank i would put get some of my boot yeah and i made the mistake of telling graham mctavish and so he demanded that i ransom him half of the gold that i'd taken and then i've got 48 pieces of gold and he ended up with 24 of them but then he told he went to a convention with daniel gorman and they told that story yeah so then there wasn't many questions asked but a couple of my friends who work in the prop department asked me just what i did take and i did i tried to put something in my pocket in each location and i wasn't successful in bjorn's house i think peter might have caught me and told me to put it back and so i thought well if i can't get away with it on camera and i probably shouldn't do it but yeah i got some stuff i got a i got a pipe from bilbo's house oh and i got um some salt and pepper shakers maybe or maybe some candelabra something like that man you're a you're a regular uh lobelia baggins that's a knock on the it's a knock on the door it's the fbi they had doubles for everything triples for everything [Laughter] oh man that's great um sorry i don't have much of the gold left i used it to pay some debts i owe the elves some money so um that's very that's a very in character thing for you though because uh you know i was telling you earlier before we hopped on the live stream so one of my favorite uh behind the scenes books if i can get it in camera here the uh the hobbit chronicles yeah so this this is a fantastic book i remember recommend it to anybody who's a fan of of uh the middle earth films um so it's got a a lot in there um that we don't necessarily it's we either don't see it in the hobbit films or it's uh it's more noticeable after you've read the information in here like um for instance the big thing with nori is he likes to steal things um yeah so i mean in your defense you're just being in character so absolutely yeah that's part of my job yeah we used to tell peter jackson i mean it's just chad peanut character so like some of the the things that i picked up on you know as uh re-watching the films in light of you know the stuff you talk about your character in the book um so you know we have the obvious moment in rivendell where there's like a cup or something that you're shoving in your your jacket and uh another thing you said is you know he's he's looking for the exits because he's kind of a shifty character you know and like in bayern's house uh you know the other dwarves are kind of looking around and you're just kind of like you know glancing around for the exits kind of thing and you know you mentioned uh uh glowing um glowing is uh says nori get a shovel and you know in the book it talks about how um gloyne and nori both have kind of a mutual appreciation for money so you know there's there's those little moments like that um that that are there you know especially if you know you've you've heard some of this uh content from the book so are there other things anything else from you know as nori um for the character you know that uh that you kind of had in your mind that maybe didn't you know come through in the films as much um for the you know for those of us who might have missed it yeah there was uh one of the things they talked about is nori being ostracized from his family like you can go and steal from other races but you don't really want to be caught stealing at home and maybe he had been on the road and maybe living rough a bit we all sort of got given back stories at this big meeting that we had at the beginning where they showed us our costume designs and the kind of coloration of the families and they kind of went through what the family dynamic was and so mark mark being the older brother he you know he had quite a lot to even put into in terms of how that dynamic might be and adam and i we got to talk about that as well in all of our training and boot camp we got to talk about how this dynamic between the three brothers might work and i used to stand myself away from those two quite a bit like i would find myself drifting around and listening to conversations so it was kind of a conscious thing i did where i would we would look because mark was always saying why don't you come and stand with us i'm like nah i want to go and stand over here um and it was a character thing it was that kind of thing i've tried to tell that story physically because you've got 13 characters who are all dressed in similar garb and although they went for very distinct looks that was our job was to create that fabric within those scenes where the focus isn't on us it's on bilbo telling the story or foreign getting you know information from gandalf or whatever you still have to tell that story in the background for it to be subliminally picked up by the audience the fact that when you read the chronicles you go back and you can see it that means we've kind of sprinkled yeah it talks about peter talks about sprinkling that kind of background into into um into the films and i think he does it really cleverly by giving you the information and then it's up to you to try and portray that as hard as you can yeah yeah are there um are there any other you know uh nori in the background moments even if it's something that didn't end up in the finished film like is there anything you can in particular remember um you know kind of doing in the background that to fit his character no not really it's we we were there to kind of serve the story and so we were given these little story beats they were quite fun there was little glasses between people that you might not pick up where we kind of you know look i i'd quite often see what gloin was thinking especially when money especially when money was being talked about and there was quite in the original script there was a bit more to do with that whole deal and bargain thing we made at the beginning the bet about where the bilbo would come along on the journey um you know when we're riding along on the ponies and i'm collecting people are chucking me sacks of money and i'm checking it to other people there was a kind of a bit that glowing had with nori about whether or not he would come and we took dividends within the other dwarves and so we didn't really get to see that although that was kind of part of the sprinkling you know if we'd had time if we'd been up if we'd been able to make for our 50 films of the hobbit we could have sprinkled all that stuff in there yeah but that's not the way that it was right right yeah that's okay but yeah it was it was fun kind of coming up with ways that we could keep ourselves as a unit but kind of trying to tell those stories there was an enmity between dwalin and nori that that graham and i played quite a lot okay you know where you know and then he kind of saves me and picks me up and dusts me off after we fall through um from the troll caves so little things like that they were kind of fun to play yeah i love i actually i i think that might be in the book as well the you know that dwalin's kind of not sure about nori a little bit yeah yeah so you met you mentioned uh you know the the bit with you and uh gloin um not making the final cut so i i have another question here from patreon um what was your favorite scene that was cut yeah i don't really know that's that's a really really hard question to ask because if it were up to me i'd leave them all in there and everything that we shot it all feels like gold when you're doing it yeah um you know when you get the extended version of the theatrical version it's it's always nice when you see the extended version and there are little bits that you did kind of kind of that are in there like the little exchange that i have with dwylan and bjorn's house where i'm going and let's go out the back window and he's sort of going what are you don't be a coward um and you know and and the stuff where i'm caught stealing from rivendale when the the goblins tip out the bag and right you know yeah you just you always hope that those moments will get extended a bit but that's just an actor's ego you always want to see yourself on screen more um you know the filmmakers and the people wanting to sell the film they've got a journey that they're going on as well and you kind of have to you kind of have to not worry about the scenes they've got cut that you would love to be in there i like them all yeah all the bits with nori that were cut all that bit no matter how many hours long the movie would be i would watch them all i i think it i think i think there's something like a million feet of film out there from the lord of the rings probably you know if you put it all together all the bits that they cut out of all of the films there'd probably be a lot of film left to make yeah i i've so my um my kind of theory you know i i i'm sure you're probably aware that you know lord of the rings and the hobbit came out on 4k recently have you have you seen it in 4k yet i haven't although i have a 4k tv but i'm just not sure how i'm going to get to watch it so yeah but when i do i'm definitely going to watch him and show and yeah yeah some someone out there with a 4k tv who's got it get me on the weekend very good to watch the marathon i've watched the marathon a few times at the roxy cinema jamie selkirk and richard and tania helped restore a cinema in miramar um a beautiful old cinema and it's a beautiful art deco it's got amazing sound and of course amazing seating and i went there with my son and a few others um from new zealand and we sort of took part in watching those all of the hobbit movies and then all of the little rings in a row over the course of a weekend and it was pretty cool that's really cool yeah that's so the the way i saw a battle of five armies actually was uh you know here in the states at least they they a lot of theaters had um screenings where they would show the first two films and then at midnight the third film would show and so that's what i did i went and sat in a movie theater for you know 10 to 12 hours that day and it was amazing yeah it's a great way to spend the day oh it's um it's it's um they're pretty yeah they're pretty impressive pieces of artwork you know they've they the people who made the films really cared about the fan base i think absolutely yeah i think that's you know one of the things that um you know people really love and appreciate you know looking back at both lord of the rings and the hobbit it's it's evident i feel in uh it seems like everybody you know actors uh behind the scenes folks you know obviously uh peter fran phillipa they all they all have the same love of tolkien's world that us fans do yeah you guys are all fans yourself um so it's absolutely yeah yeah i was a fan of the books as a young man growing up i grew up on a um on a sheep farm in central new zealand not far away from mount doom and mount and the misty mountains actually uru pehu which we use for both we shot stuff up on there for the ride to the black gate and the prologue and then we shot stuff up there for the hobbit and of course mount notahoo which is the mountain next to it which they use for the kind of silhouette or shape of mount doom they were just half an hour from the top of the hills on my farm so i grew up with that mythology and being able to look at those mountains little did i know if not that would have been 1969 1970 maybe you know in 20 years time um i i would actually get to be in those movies it was pretty cool yeah so you so did you um you know as as a young uh a youngin um you know reading through tolkien's works did you look look at you know what would become mountain doom and think of that as you know i did yeah yeah pretty amazing yeah i would i i thought i was aragorn of course and all the sheep on the farm with the orcs they were terrified of um of stryder on his horse yeah yeah that very romantic view of um of life my my kind of view of life which one of the things that sustained me on farming life being able to go up on my horse you know believing that i was in those those epic tales and talking you know they're the ones that stayed with me yeah absolutely so yeah i've had that i've been incredibly blessed and i know that you know who would have thought that a a huge fan like me would end up actually being allowed to be in those films it's been it's been a privilege wow that's fantastic so so is uh being a fan of the books before being in the movies who who is your favorite uh character was it aragorn you mentioned aragorn so yeah i think the strider character of aragon for me that that idea of this person who's hiding his identity for long periods of time but always doing good for other people like he's not doing it just for himself he's doing it to try and save the remnants of humanity from this last kind of great evil yeah i think i think that's if you're a romantic anyway i remember romantic at heart that's the kind of character i really loved pharaoh too or you know yeah and of course who wouldn't want to be who wouldn't want to be gunned off what an amazing part [Laughter] why are your fools now speaking okay so this this is gonna bring me into something you know uh something else that's you may have heard uh there's a little show being filmed in new zealand right now um that has a little bit to do with middle earth and uh the other day that you know you've as far as the uh the bingo card for races of middle earth really the only thing you're missing is a wizard so you know i think i i think the hashtag i used the other day was brophy the blue i would love to see you as a blue wizard um wouldn't that be amazing that would be amazing yeah so um you know you probably you probably couldn't even tell me if you were involved in the lord of the rings on prime but um is there anything there is there interest there or total yeah i'm i'm i'm busy enough you know so yeah you never know i i i i had to ask i couldn't i couldn't go with that i know even if even if i even if i knew anything i wouldn't be able to tell you because then i'd have to track you down and i'd have to make sure that no one ever saw you again right you know jeff bezos's uh crew would you know from amazon would come me down uh yeah any big film you know any big film absolutely um we got it we got another super chat um five dollars donated to frontline workers from scramble um do you ever watch behind the scenes to get some nostalgia so like the behind the scenes features um you know if you're you're missing your friends from from the filming do you do you watch the behind the scenes stuff to to remember sadly i only watch my bits [Laughter] no i do i do i do get nostalgic it's i there's a friend of mine that i see quite quite often who was one of the horse department with me and he quite he quite often comes up and sees my horse as well and we talk about those great old days of being on location because that's one of the most amazing things about those films for us as a nation is we got to see our own country through the eyes of all of these international fans new zealand is a beautiful place but a lot of kiwis take that incredibly for granted and i think this last year because we haven't been able to go anywhere has has got kiwis to fall in love with that just as much as our overseas fandom and and audience did as well it's a huge character in those films as the beauty of this country and the remoteness and the kind of almost primordial look to the landscape here there's a kind of an energy in this country that lends itself to that mythical brooding kind of atmospheric landscape that an incredible bunch of people were lucky enough to work and i know that all of those international actors that came here just went wow we are so lucky to be here making these films in this place so absolutely and it's a it's amazing the variety of uh landscapes that you guys have you know you look at new zealand and it's it's not that big really but we pack a lot in yeah you do yeah it's like those kids lunch boxes the ones with all the compartments we have one of those the super lunch box we have a bit of everything i mean i i did see a thing peter talking about doing all the location scouting and just going you know so many places they could have used they were sort of spoiled for choice um i love that story of them flying over and then seeing hobbiton and seeing the party tree right there and knowing that they've finally found that location and i've i've been privileged to go to hobbiton a lot and i've shown a lot of my friends around there and i've even been asked if i'll become a celebrant so that i can marry people there you know i might do it and do it in black speech or learn a bit of how for sure do it in kusdul khazad feel the fire of the doors and you get married oh that's fantastic yeah it was kind of cool married anybody yet then no no i haven't i haven't right it would be imagine doing it as an orc i mean would that be a union you could actually call real i don't think so then nori you know he'd just be like making off with the the ring from the ring yeah i just need to go over here and just check this ring out before i give it to you and he's off boy so no um another interesting thing with nori so another thing from from the book that i read uh was a quote from richard taylor where he actually said that uh nori was his favorite dwarf uh because of the design you know he had the um you know for lack of starfish yeah i'm glad i'm glad that's what you guys call it too look i i was stupid enough to read all of the fan comments when our images first came out and there were those that really loved it and there were those that really hated it and i just learned that you couldn't we couldn't keep everyone happy but what i loved about it um was that you could always see where nori was in silhouette you know if ever it was getting dark or they're up on the hills you could actually see the hairdo um it was all about the hair but my question and one of the things we never got to see is them grooming i think it would have been very interesting for the audience to see what they had to go through to keep those styles because there's a lot of cool styles on there there is yeah and i noticed that like even nori's eyebrows have like beats and everything that's that story that story just missing dory's the hairdresser if the whole group he's he's the one that does all the braiding i mean he mark would never say this but definitely was his character oh man that's great and i i noticed you know um as the films go on nori's hair does get a little more disheveled as as things get real so to speak and uh i think you know uh of the people in charge of continuity for for stuff like that you know like oh you know oh that's a little too much hair out of there you know i can't even imagine yeah that we you know i think they're the unsung heroes actually that both the continuity and the makeup and wardrobe department in terms of being all over they watch the scenes really carefully and they watch playback and they look at that stuff meticulously like where the belt was where it hung in the previous scene what's happened in the meantime has it become disheveled has he fallen over in the mud we need to put more mud there and sometimes you're not even shooting in sequence and you're coming back to stuff that you shot months before and they do they take a series of photographs meticulously noting what the scene was and what time and what you were holding and all of that stuff and actors really rely on them doing their job because we can't remember sometimes no i had it in my left hand no it was in your right hand i'm pretty sure i'd know when i'm carrying a torch it was on my left hand no no it was in your right well i think you'll find it was in my right hand as you say because they hardly ever they're hardly ever wrong right yeah i mean it's you know it's funny because pretty much any movie you watch there's some kind of you know there's websites and stuff that say goofs and stuff and like it's it's gonna happen but it's amazing that it doesn't happen more often honestly yeah you know especially on big productions like lord of the rings and the hobbit yeah yeah i mean yeah kiwi crew qb and overseas crew that work you know on those films there they also help each other a lot there's a lot of interdepartmental kind of helping out plus you might see something that props misses or something like that and they always you know there's a lot of teamwork involved in those big films i mean i just know my makeup artist is there before i get there in the morning and they're probably there long after i leave as his wardrobe so yeah i certainly know where the glamour part of the industry is they work really hard to make to make these films work for the people yeah pete peter's pretty good too at noticing stuff yeah yeah so that's i i was curious you know how much uh you know other when you mentioned other departments and stuff i wondered if uh you know uh how much the director sees that kind of stuff or is he working on you know bigger picture kind of things you know that's interesting to know that peter peter picks up on that stuff too yeah he'll you know definitely if he thinks it's not right he'll ask the question if he thinks it wasn't quite you know the way that it was on a previous take or the last time that we shot it there's a lot i mean i i would not be able to do that job i really you know i'd have to have a lot of help he he is amazing for having the story in his head that you know he's got a very clear understanding of the way that he wants to shoot it and the drama that he wants to um evoke from that scene and and what the overall feel of the scene is not just for the the character talking about for all of the background players too he's very clear about the tone that he wants that he's trying to set um and the rhythm that he's wanted to get and he knows the reason why and he's pretty good at imparting that that's you know that's one of the great things about having worked on those films too is just seeing the artisan the craft of all of those people in terms of what they bring to that storytelling i think we can get wrapped up in the fact that we're the ones on screen telling the story but for me it's all of that other stuff that makes the difference we just get to play within that amazing kind of landscape that they've created some of the sets and some of the sets were just extraordinary what they managed to recreate in the studio was those you know those um the construction people and the designers that put that stuff together they they they deserve every penny that they make yeah they it's and that's part of the reason what's so great about you know um both lord of the rings and the hobbit have you know on their home releases you have these bonus features all the appendices that you know kind of get us uh you know get the fans an inside look at that and you're just blown away by you know the different departments so all the people that are just all bringing their a game every day to make something like that happen yep and they and and they do it willingly too because they know that they're making something more than just another story absolutely well we just got a uh another super chat this one from oh my scrolly messed up a little bit okay there we go um garrett garlinger just donated five dollars thank you garrett he says thank you so much for coming on to talk with us if someone came to visit new zealand what would be your recommended place to go well you've got to do hobbiton because you have to go and see that amazing place that they created there it's a beautiful beautiful part of the country and then some of the big locations in the south island lake jacopo glenorchy down in queenstown where we shot you know down in greenstone down there there's a place where we shot the rohan packing up and getting on the horses for the ride off to ministerith you know eventually um yeah and bjorn's house was down there in a place called paradise so there are some kind of iconic places that really do not look real until you see them with your own eyes you've got to go and have a look um photographs and then even in the film kind of don't do justice to the grandeur of the south island itself we shot a lot of location stuff down there the north island too but the south island has this primordial other other kind of it's become synonymous with middle earth you know in terms of when you when you see that stuff on ads or whatever you go off that's you know that's middle earth that's that's lake town or yeah lake takapuna and lake pukak is where they shot lake town and the mineral content of the lake turns it this kind of weird bluey almost teal color that doesn't look real wow and of course come to my local cafe the rosetta cafe and rameki south you might run into me there and we'll certainly tell some lies [Laughter] that's probably that's where you hide some of your uh your um [Laughter] they're on display there and the little museum to me [Laughter] we just got uh another super chat ten dollars thank you so much uh this is from uh gigi uh quillian um sorry about it um my grandchildren read tolkien books and the eight-year-old is now forging swords in my backyard brilliant yes any advice for grandma [Laughter] just give them a camera and let them make their own movies but you need to get someone to show them how to use those swords carefully yeah it sounds like you weren't too far off from that you know playing aragorn in the backyard with the sheep i mean were you yeah that's right worried about the sheep i i think that i think my dad probably worried i was a dreamer and was never going to be a farmer which turned out to be true [Laughter] um but yeah it was just back in those days we didn't have playstation or any other distractions you had to make up your own kind of stories and both my boys actually used to get out and make their own versions of lord of the rings with that you know take a shot with this old video camera and then that with the ring in there and suddenly the ring would disappear but a bumblebee a bumblebee will have thrown through the shot at that it was they made this amazing thing with the ring was there and then a bumblebee went through and the ring was gone um and and they made their own versions of um of the black rider they had a black cloak and yeah i think it's i think it's great that the films renewed some enthusiasm for the books and for tolkien's other work as well i know that i went back and re-read a whole lot of um different books that we had that j.r.r and christopher had written that were in part of my household from my mother's time and new books that we got and yeah we all we we as a family feel you know we it's renewed our love for it as well yeah absolutely yeah um like we were chatting a little bit before we went live here and i mentioned you know like i was introduced through fellowship of the ring was my first exposure to tolkien and it just kind of um obviously that has spiraled to the point where now i'm uh sitting here on youtube you know on a weekly basis talking about lord of the rings but um you know there's some amazing cinematography in that movie in particular oh yeah absolutely like it it was just like nothing i had ever seen you know it's like i i kind of liken it to the way people of like my parents generation talk about seeing star wars for the first time that's my that's my generation yeah i i was i was at um i was at boarding school when i when the first star wars came out so i i remember the hype that it generated and how it changed people's kind of view and pleasure yeah but i think i mean i think you know for a lot of people that's what lord of the rings was you know i i know it was for me you know i like i said i was in college when it came out a freshman in college and like it was just nothing i had ever seen or experienced before and i was absolutely just hooked and um like you said you know it's driven a lot of people to to the books which is fantastic you know there's a huge huge world um that tolkien created and we've only you know in in the six films that we've got so far we've only scratched the surface really of the entire story and um you know you mentioned uh you've actually um you know gotten a chance to hang out and uh converse with some of the tolkien family i know you mentioned uh roy tolkien before we we hopped on here what's it been like to uh you know to kind of um see it from both sides you know the the book side and then also the film side roy's roy's um he's a he's a he's a kiwi really he spent a bit of time in new zealand filming with both films but also just kind of hanging out with those of us that were doing the job and i've stayed with him a couple of times in the uk when i've gone over there and we've been at conventions together and he even kind of looked after my son at a convention in germany you know i kind of hung out with him when i was doing the panels that i was doing um and he's told him he's told me some great stories about being in the family and getting told stories at his um you know mother's knee about what it was like being a member of that family and his great-grandfather and his grandfather um you know he doesn't claim to know everything about the family but he has an amazing insight into into the fabric of that universe in terms of the writing of it and my great heart actually was at oxford at university at the same time as um as tolkien she was uh yes she was the head of her faculty or a lecturer in genealogy there i think genealogy and um yeah she used to go and listen to him talk in the pub and you know kind of eavesdrop on his conversation and she wrote a book herself and took me to she when i went there at night he actually took me to show me where he actually wrote the hobbit so it's always been a part of our family too that kind of that kind of tolkien mythology and she had a lot of a lot of different books leafed by niggle um and the father christmas leaders all the christmas leaders that he wrote that she gave to me that became part of the books that i handed on to my children so yeah i mean it's an amazing what amazes me is is the fact that it stood the test of time you know i i read the books way back then and we're still talking about it i can't think of any other novel um in my lifetime anyway that's held me as strongly as these have yeah absolutely yeah i mean it's it it's constantly you know being named to all-time greatest lists and everything you know for good reason like you said it's absolutely timeless and there's something there that that resonates so deeply with people and yeah yeah yeah i think i think the film's captured that too they have that kind of timelessness like the lord of the rings it hasn't dated at all it's still the special effects in there and the way that they told the story and the coloration of the cinematography the way that they show darkness and that they show light in there i don't think i don't think the more special effects you chuck with something you're necessarily ever going to get it better there was some there was a way that they came across andrew and andrew and his camera team and peter and his design team and the writers the way that they came it's like a perfect storm they also cast incredibly like incredible human beings that just happened to be some of the best actors on the planet but they were actually amazing people to begin with that was kind that was a kind of a gift as well that they got a group of people that so wanted to work together and knew that they're into something special even if it was confusing at times we all knew that we were making something good yeah absolutely i mean there's so many gosh you think of how many iconic moments you know iconic not just lord of the rings moment but iconic cinema moments are in that lord of the rings in particular that trilogy it's it's really amazing yeah and they've been copied too yeah it's funny my i i introduced uh my sons to the uh chronicles of narnia movies the other day and they're like and one of them has actually read it and they're like why why did this you know why is this like this in the movie i was like oh because they were trying to you know be like lord of the rings yeah yeah you can't help but you know you can't when you i'm sure every filmmaker has films that have influenced them in some way subliminally you know subconsciously changed the way that they see telling stories but i've seen that motif of black horses chasing a white horse through trees a few a few times in films since yeah yeah absolutely uh well we just got another uh super chat for uh i think i'm not very up to date on my uh my currency symbols but i think this is five pounds so excellent i have something i can tell you it's like it's like a hundred dollars new zealand um so carl johnson thank you carl johnson uh he asks do you have any stories involving the lake sir christopher lee during the set of either lord of the rings or the hobbit i do and i've i've shared this story a few times actually um one of the first days i got to work with sir christopher lee i i managed to get two three four maybe four four or so days working with him but on my first day was the scene i think it's only an extended edition and i don't think you'd see shaku actually talking but he asks me a question are the wags blooded and i say yes my lord they have tasted human flesh they are ready to attack and then he says release the walls what i actually see because i had these huge teeth in my mouth i said and my teeth came out of my mouth and hit him in the forehead [Laughter] all captured on film kind of bounced off his head and he turned to peter and said is it my turn to talk um he was not put off but at all and we had a couple of conversations about working in prosthetics he told me the the terrible time that he'd had doing the mummy being all encased and so he kind of understood what i was going through yeah um yeah i loved there was a day where he and um he and ian were sitting on the seat and talking and days that we had off if i was around i would always go over and see if i could watch what was going on especially people like him working because it's like watching a master class of someone that you've grown up on in every kind of horror film hamahara film but also every british film um you know made in a certain era 271 features he'd done at that time yeah um you know you're kind of working with someone that's been there and done that yeah i mean yeah even you even you know in addition to all the horror things and uh you know you think someone who's been uh uh you know a little even more recently i mean he's been in star wars he's been yeah uh yeah he was even james bond right he was a james bond yeah yeah he did that in the middle of shooting actually in the middle of you know when we came back to do pickups he'd gone away and played um count dooku and um and come back two towers i believe so like he had a big that was a good number for him because those both came out yeah so we just got another super chat 10 thank you so much uh tug r not sure if it's already been discussed any thoughts on the feeling that the hobbit trilogy stretched the source material too thin i actually think there's there's more there you know i think ideally you know if you if you talk about those characters in the future i'd love to see what happens when the dwarves go and open up moria you know so with the with the building too deep and um you know angering the balrog and then kind of getting the comeuppance and what happens to nori and orio i know what happens to aurora obviously he goes there because he doesn't follow nori's advice but what happens to nori does he go and set up a series of yeah does he set up a little second-hand shop stuff that he's you know like a pawn shop what does he do there's you know there's far more that we could do with the characters yeah i don't know i i love the book but i do i like the intent i like the intent of actually trying to explore those characters as individuals because they're kind of talked about as a bit of a lump in the hobbit the dogs especially um it was nice to feel like we were trying to give them kind of a real social fabric we did a lot of work on on creating this like this dynamic of who the dwarves were when faced with an enemy and then when they were just amongst themselves the kind of infighting yeah yeah that's yeah and if i can you know kind of add you know because i've i get asked this question a lot here on the channel too and uh you know my my response has always been you know the the argument that oh it's one book you know why would it be three film i think that's putting it very simplistically you know obviously there's a lot more going on in tolkien's world than just what was in this first you know light and breezy children's book you know yeah um like personally i i love seeing the dogel door stuff um me too it's great saying i mean gosh yeah one of my favorite moments actually is uh it's just in the extended edition but when um you know the the orc that was the original design for bog um yeah has gandalf and then galadriel comes in and she you know just like waves her hand and he just like disintegrates he's like absolutely love that part so yeah yeah if i you know if i were to that i would say you know i yeah i i love that there's more to the story being told than just you know if you just stuck to the book it would be incredibly short and incredib you know you wouldn't know any of the dwarves like you said they're just kind of referred to as the group you know besides warren not many of them talk so yeah kind of boring honestly you know if they if they just stuck to that but yeah yeah you know it's who knows why um things end up as they are but it was a thrill for me to work for so long on something so good it was it was it was a real it was that one of the hardest things to do was to walk away from that group of people and and know that we weren't going to come to work on monday and and do it all over again you know trailer park disappeared and this kind of meet-and-greet that we have in the morning and just sound each other out get into our fat suits go to breakfast prosthetic heads on you know without the wigs and beds here going through the whole process and kind of gearing up and the camaraderie playing table tennis with martin and not realizing that he was a really gifted player he would let mark and i get really close and then just thrash us before he was called to see it i think the bonus features a little bit you guys playing ping pong yeah we got we got pretty good at that because we played quite a towards the towards the end when the table was in that particular room and that studio that we were shooting in um i think martin actually messed up quite a few pairs of his feet because it was a concrete floor we were shuffling around on but it was worth it but he's taking it seriously so he wasn't gonna you know he's gonna sacrifice the feet if that's what that's what gets him the win you know i got close to beating him a couple of times but i never actually beat him did anybody ever beat him i think i'm not sure if marked it or not you'd have to ask mark hadlow with her you should get him on this because he'll probably refute everything i've said but yeah i i'm not sure if he won or not but i know that i didn't that was kind of frustrating yeah because you know because marty can be a he can be a real smartass and give you a hard time it's always nice to get something over him he's just so good at too many things funny that's i'm sure that's like a ticking clock too as the production's winding down you're like man i only have a certain number of days to beat him yeah that's right yeah are you gonna do that i know you go i was just gonna say we've got a few more uh super chats here i was gonna read off here um middle earth lore sent a couple bucks glad i was able to catch this when i could thank you middle earth lore um oh my scrolling um we've got another one for five dollars thank you carnivales um uh they have alex are you going to watch the new show from amazon what do you think about it yeah of course i am yeah i'd be mad not to yeah i mean one of the great things about the whole streaming platform thing is the ability to be able to tap into to new shows and yeah i'm going to be watching avidly yeah absolutely i wouldn't miss it we've got uh duncan idaho um gave five pounds thank you it says uh thank you very much do you have a favorite character from any of the books that didn't make it into the movies that you wish did absolutely i mean like everybody else tom bombadil i really just yeah it was one of the parts of the i read the lord of the rings quite young i was probably too young i might have been only eight years old seven or eight years old i don't really i didn't understand it but that character really had captured me just in terms of who was the strange person who had all these powers but chose not to use them and you know but was kind of a force to be reckoned with um was he a maya was he you know was he one of the gods was he was he just an elemental force that came into being on its own i love kind of that whole section of the book but of course you can't you can't have them all in there you just can't do it yeah yeah you know tom tom's uh you know his section of the story is one of those that's kind of easy to cut out without affecting the entire story you know some people might fight me on that a little bit but you know yeah it's one of those that it's a pretty sizable chunk and if you take it out obviously as we saw in the films you know it doesn't structurally change it from a film perspective no we'll get a tv show one day of lord of the rings and we'll get some tombadil in there exactly yeah yeah it's um i would i would i wouldn't i yeah i don't know i don't know who else i i kind of missed from there really i just because i understand the filmmaking you have to make those hard decisions you gotta yeah you know there's there's a saying that you've got to put to sleep those things that you like best sometimes for the good of the story and i know that you know i might be talking out of turn here but i'm sure that peter would like to have released the nine hour versions of each of those films because he loves it so much you know he loves making films that he would like to watch and he would gladly sit and watch nine hour versions of those films and i probably would too i absolutely would do that in a heartbeat yeah yeah and the majority of um fans probably would yeah probably we've got another couple thank you guys for for your donations uh we got another question here um asking uh how stressful and tiring was it being on set and uh were you sleep deprived yeah that does tend to happen the longest makeup i had was shaku which was seven to seven and a half hours and so you'd be getting to work at two in the morning not just me but the five makeup artists that were working in the bus at the same time that i was there there was nine layers of body paint so they'd paint the front do the face do the eyes around there and then roll me over and do the back and do all the little scar inserts but then there's the take off time which is about an hour and a half to two hours so it's a long you know anything up to 17 18 sometimes 90 now days not just for me and then you've got to turn around and the next day i'll be back with the horse department you know starting at six in the morning so so not a lot of sleep sometimes and you do the only thing that gets you through is really good nutrition making sure that you drink lots of water and learning to sleep when you can i think aidan turner may be the very best at just dropping to sleep whenever he was able to yeah he could go to sleep anywhere he'd turn around and aiden would be a sleeping costume he was i hope you don't mind me saying that adam because he was always on when he needed to be but yeah he could keep anywhere that's that's awesome yeah i think i think that's in some i don't know if aidan's is but i know uh you know in some of the behind the scenes people are you know getting makeup or prosthetics that kind of stuff done and they're kind of snoozing while they working on them it's kind of impressive honestly that that they're able to do i think it's a skill really yeah it's a necessity um so here's a another question for you so um and we'll we're going to wrap this up folks in about uh four minutes here so um if you want to get any uh super chats in i'll try to get to as many of them as i can again uh those are all going to uh to the benefit of um frontline healthcare workers um what uh you know if there was a any tolkien player or character sorry um and maybe you've kind of answered this earlier with the characters you pretended to be as a kid you know if you could be any talking character um in any portrayal of any story in tolkien's world what what would you choose what would be your number one oh that's that's really tricky isn't it that's a hard one yeah yeah i mean if we if we made it all again if lord of the rings hadn't happened so we went back in time or we changed the space-time continuum yeah yeah i i'd like to come back as either aragorn or or gandalf yeah i will say like your gandalf voice is very impressive i think it's i'm not it's like we were born twins [Laughter] now is he would you say uh is ian mckellen the one that you can like it you have quite a range you know just from talking with you here and when you you know slip into a voice and you know obviously we get different voices in your work uh you know is who would you say out of you know all your cast mates from the two trilogies can you impersonate the best yeah probably probably ian i yeah i have spent a bit of time around him yeah yeah i mean he he would he he would do himself better but i did get to i did get to you know to impersonate his voice a few times he's um he's amazing to watch it was like a master class every day being on set with them he um yeah his skill level in terms of being able to immerse himself in that character to go from in in in pretty much straight into gandalf and be able to hold it like that and i know he has played it for a long time but um yeah it was wonderful wonderful to be on set that first day in bag end the stephen hunter probably backed me up on this all of us were just some kind of war that we were we were on set there we were dressed up as dwarves and there was gandalf it wasn't us as people it was we were in character and there was gandalf it was pretty surreal yeah absolutely yeah i think you know myself included that you know when you conjure up a mental image of gandalf you think of ian mckellen's performance you know you don't look at i don't watch the movies and think oh there's ian mckellen i'm like oh yeah that's the gandalf yeah he has that amazing stage theatricality that really lends itself to that character and the way that he plays it he lets himself go into those emotional places and really feel stuff and i don't know i don't know if i heard this or i'm making it up on my head but i think he once said that if you think it it shows but if you show it it kind of you're overdoing it so just thinking it for the camera and it kind of shows it may or may not be a quote we can we give it to him if it's not yeah we'll do a secondary quote you know ian mckellen and underneath that will put jed brophy or allegedly yeah digitally yeah there you go um all right so we've got uh one last um super chat here five dollars from emily crawford thank you emily emily um she asks so many stories have uh been inspired or influenced by lord of the rings do you have a favorite literary descendant of tolkien i'm a bit of a remedy feast fan um i've read most of his most of his books you know from the magician onwards and right through to the end of that series the riffler series and most of the books in between and also david gemmell and maybe david headings as well i do i do like fantasy and that my love of fantasy writers j.r.r martin as well know the game of thrones that all comes from having read lord of the rings back in the day and also understanding that you know there's a reason why fantasy is like it is it is escapism it's a it's a way of being able to kind of imagine a world in a different place yeah um yeah yeah i certainly like fantasy as a journal to read but i read a lot of other stuff as well i agree grammar she's got you know he's um he's another one who reads he reads a lot of books on set he's always got a book on the go and i'm always amazed at the kind of breadth of stuff that he reads he's got such a diverse i must make myself a bit more diverse interesting so what kind of things do did uh graham have on on set during the hobbit that he was reading i'm really useless at people's names um he read he read a lot of stuff on you know war history certain periods obviously there's a lot of stuff in there in terms of what he's just been doing with men and celts his research into the scottish highlands and the heritage there and the culture of the clans all sorts of authors biographies just things that interested him um but yeah voracious reader he won't mind me saying that he was uh yeah he always had a book on the go that's great yeah it's always fun when you see a big tough guy like graham who's you know he's not he's he's really not he's he's a lovely lovely he's a big deal yeah he's a big softy yeah yeah he's a pushover no he's not really [Laughter] well so much um yeah we're running out of time here so i just wanted to say uh thank you so much um oh i we did just have one last super chat so i'll read this one really quick uh twenty dollars from call link nine two four thank you so much calling um thanks i was lucky enough to get a cameo from uh from you for my birthday a few months ago it was incredible you're a huge inspiration i just wanted a chance to say hello and thanks well thank you very much it's always a pleasure to to be able to do something for someone um we know we're lucky to have been on this film so yeah any little stories that i can impart i'm always happy to and i'll just if i if i don't have any i'll just make some up thank you so much jed um and like we mentioned just there um that was a great plug you can find jed on cameo um and maybe you'll get to meet seb the horse from yeah the lord of the rings he's hanging out over by the mumma kill field well yeah thank you again so much dad this was a lot of fun and um just on behalf of all the the fans um you know just thank you for all you've done in the world of middle earth and bringing so many characters um you know i think i think you probably have the uh if there's such a thing as a guinness world record for most characters in middle earth i think you've got it locked down so um yeah there would there would be um there would be some stunt performers who would challenge that i think my horse my horse probably did more shots than i did [Laughter] you're telling us you know we we really should have been interviewing seb is what you're saying yeah you know i was in the film i remember this one day that gandalf petted me it was pretty amazing pretty much every day you come and say hello you know yeah so he's basically seb is best friends with ian mckellen so he's best friends with everyone he was everywhere i see him talking to the other horses just talking about the scenes that he did and the times that he had talking to peter jackson hey does he stay humble or does he get kind of a big head about it no he became a bit of a star he thought he was all that you know he's a bit more mellow now that he hasn't done a film for a while but yeah he's gotten humbled a little bit he has yeah he's gone all horsey well thank you again so much dad this was uh just so much fun um and i appreciate it uh you taking the time and uh best of luck on all your future film endeavors and i hope we can sometime and talk more middle earth um talk you know books films you name it um thank you for everyone who donated uh your donation thank you again are going to uh going to uh front front line healthcare workers um that have all been doing such an amazing job um during our current uh health situation um yeah thank you huge heroes and uh yeah those those donations will be going straight to that um so again jed thank you so much and we'll see you guys next time on nerd of the rings excellent all right

Channel: Nerd of the Rings

Views: 52,313

Keywords: tolkien, lord of the rings, lotr, hobbit, the hobbit, nerd of the rings, silmarillion, stephen hunter, bombur, bombur hobbit, the hobbit dwarf, fat dwarf hobbit, hobbit dwarf cheese, dwarf barrel, hobbit barrel scene, bombur stephen hunter, bombur behind the scenes, stephen hunter actor

Id: WhLLxR5BMSg

Length: 79min 35sec (4775 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021