With a running time of 700 minutes (give or take) and a budget of approximately $9 zillion, The Return of the King, the final installment in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, is the biggest movie of the year in every possible sense. And if there’s anything we’ve learned from the epic Tolkien adaptation, it’s that little people are capable of very great things. So as the Rings cycle comes to a close, who’s more deserving of our respect than the littlest people of them all — the hobbits? Standing considerably taller in real life, actors Sean Astin (center, who plays the loyal Samwise), Billy Boyd (right, the musically inclined Pippin), and Dominic Monaghan (left, the battle-bound Merry) reunited for a King-size conversation.

Spin: Hobbits may be noble and brave, but they’re not particularly sexy — especially compared to the movie’s elf and the human characters.
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While they may not have guns or tanks, there are a couple of hobbits who promise the next and final “Lord of the Rings” film could give “Saving Private Ryan” a run for its money.

“It’s a full-on war movie,” Elijah Wood proclaimed recently, when asked about this year’s “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.”

“As Elijah said, lots of war,” his hobbit partner Dominic Monaghan added for emphasis.

The two pals ? who played Frodo Baggins and Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck, respectively, in “The Fellowship of the Ring” and “The Two Towers” ? will soon return to New Zealand for pickup shots and re-shoots under director Peter Jackson for the final installment of the fantasy tale, which hits theaters December 17.
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Several members of the Lord of the Rings cast were at this year’s San Diego Comic Con to promote the impending DVD release (and subsequent extended edition in November) of The Two Towers, and to get fans ridiculously excited by showing an all-too-brief glimpse of Return of the King, hitting screens this winter.

I got a chance to sit with two of the four hobbits (or 22.222% of the Fellowship) in an incredibly boisterous room, and this is what the extremely laid-back Sean Astin and Dominic Monaghan had to say (or at least what I could decipher from the tape).
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Comic-Con hosted a number of The Lord of the Rings notables this year. Andy Serkis, the actor behind Gollum, was generous enough to be on hand for much of the conference, greeting fans and signing autographs. Saturday saw a remarkable flux of Hollywood talent on the exhibition floor when Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) and Dominic Monaghan (Merry Brandybuck) graced the EA GAMES booth to play The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King. A crowd instantly converged to catch a glimpse of the actors teaming up in co-op mode.

(A four-shot composite of the crowd gathered to see Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan)

Wood chose to play as Sam while Monaghan stepped into Aragorn’s virtual boots. Monaghan jokingly asked, “Can I kill Elijah?” (the answer being no, of course, since the Fellowship is fighting cooperatively to save Middle-earth).
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After a debut in the mid-1990s TV series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, it took a small role – literally – in three minor films from New Zealand (something about Lords and Rings) before most people recognised 26-year-old Dominic Monaghan as the hobbit Merry Brandybuck. He’s currently spokesman for Future Forests and, like the Baftas and Brits, is totally CarbonNeutral.

What exactly does being CarbonNeutral involve? Basically, they look at your life and how you live it and calculate the amount of carbon they estimate, or I suppose ‘guesstimate’, that you use up in a year. They ask a few questions about how you live your life, what kind of car you drive, where you live, how far you travel, that kind of thing. Then they offset the amount of carbon that you use up by planting trees in certain parts of the world. I’d been to Bangalore in India the year before so I made a request that some be put there, because I’m sure I’ll go back. So I had 40 mango trees planted in a forest that Coldplay are involved in.
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