The Lord of the Rings is an epic film trilogy that captured the hearts of Tolkien fans young and old, new, and diehard. The Peter Jackson-directed movies were so beautifully made, and as they come up on their 20th anniversary, they absolutely hold up and retain their fandom. The stars of the films have talked about their experiences over the years, and have had good things to say about making the movies, but it couldn’t have all been perfect. I’m sure the back to back shoots were rigorous, and as Sean Astin said in a recent interview, playing the part of lovable hobbit Samwise Gamgee didn’t always happen seamlessly.
Talking to the guys at the ReelBlend podcast, Astin said that there was a time during filming where he became a little out of sorts and wasn’t quite nailing his scenes. The quiet natured director Jackson approached him to set him straight, offering this little blow:
“The most painful thing Peter Jackson ever said to me… you know, he’s a man of few words. He’s a very, very stoic guy. He can be performative when he wants to, or needs to. He can act things out, and he’s very eloquent and so forth. But on a day-to-day basis, Peter Jackson is basically like a quiet guy. He sort of lets the work do the talking, and his direction was always very minimal. Mostly his direction would be, ‘Let’s do it again.’ … But he came up to me at one point and he looked at me and he said, ‘I just didn’t believe that.’ Oh my God, he might as well have — it was like a Mortal Kombat death blow. It was like he ripped my hair off of my body, and my spine came out with. … [But] it was, it was true. It was true that I was not invested, that I was out of it. I was out of the character. I was out of the mood. I was out of… I just wasn’t there.”
He did go on to admit that it did end up helping, but it was just a super tough thing to hear:
“It was brutal. And he didn’t mean it to be brutal. He meant it to land. He didn’t mean for it to be brutal, but it was a perfect piece of direction. And he was absolutely right. And it made me be better. It made me focus harder.”
It’s great that Astin was able to not take it personally and use the critique as it was intended. It sure did end up a productive piece of direction, as Samwise is really the heart of the movie, and everything that he says and does in the films is absolutely believable and sincere.