Elijah Wood Says A 'Lord of the Rings' Orc Was Designed To Resemble Harvey Weinstein
- IndieWire (@IndieWire) October 4, 2021
Elijah Wood was a guest on Dax Shepard's [OP note: uuugh] podcast recently, where he revealed that an Orc in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy was designed to look like disgraced producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. Jackson first started developing his adaptation at Miramax under Weinstein's supervision, but working together proved impossible for the director.
- The trouble began when Weinstein demanded Jackson make only one movie out of all three Tolkien books. Jackson, however, wanted at least two films under Miramax; Weinstein reportedly rejected his wishes and threated to replace him with Quentin Tarantino [OP note: lol] or Shakespeare in Love director John Madden. [OP note: LOLLLL]
- When Weinstein finally agreed to make a two-part movie, he allegedly capped the budget at $75 million without disclosing that sum to Jackson as pre-production continued for a year and a half. When the LOTR team found out about it, they took matters into their own hands by leaking the script in an attempt to get the project away from Weinstein. The plan to stir up buzz on the script's strength and lure in another buyer worked; Bob Shaye at New Line Cinema was interested, and the rest is history.
- "I think the lore is that they were coming with two and it was Bob Shaye who said, 'We have to do three,' which is insane," Wood said. "An incredible risk. Miramax thought there was no chance in hell."
- "It's funny, this was recently spoken about because Dom [Monaghan] and Bill [Boyd] have a podcast, The Friendship Onion. They were talking to Sean Astin about his first memory of getting to New Zealand. He had seen these 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 fuck you."
- Wood added, "I think that it's okay to talk about now, the guy is fucking incarcerated. Fuck him."
- UPDATE: Based on this Sean Astin Facebook post from 2017 [h/t genbu_no_miko24] and the fact that we all have eyes, OP believes this ugly thing is the Weinstein Orc:
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