For both Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan, who as Merry and Pippin experience life-changing transformations (both on and off screen) as intense as any of their marquee-name costars, the final shot was one of third-act triumph rather than the sort of tomfoolery that got them into trouble so frequently in the first two films. “My last shot of principal photography was really dull,” explained Boyd, who shows his color in the final moments of Return To the King. “[It was] a blue screen shot climbing up to like the beacon, looking around the edge of a thing that’s not even in the movie. And I remember being quite disappointed that it was my last shot.”

Thankfully, the reshoots allowed Boyd to enjoy a more fitting conclusion to the experience. “My last shot was killing the Orc that’s about to kill Gandalf (in ROTK). I thought, that’s a great shot to have shot. So that was, kind of looking at my sword with the blood on it, and I thought ‘that’s great.’”

Monaghan suggests that the actual on-set time was boring, but for audiences who will witness his seemingly single-handed defeat of a mammoth adversary, the end result was anything but. “[It was] going through the Oliphant and slicing the legs with my sword, which is blue screen. There was no one there. Everyone else was on Stage A and I was on like Stage like D with Miranda.”

With the physical tumult of shooting having been completed, Monaghan quickly realized that the emotional one had yet to be conquered. “We finished it and then I walked over to Stage A and saw Pete and Fran and they knew that I’d wrapped, and they gave you the opportunity to try an impossible task of summing up four years of your life in front of all these people.”

Expectedly, it was an enormously difficult task to encapsulate four years of one’s life into a five- or ten minute speech. “I tried to get across more than anything else that the experience I’d had changed the way that my life had been leading, and moved it on a 90 degree angle to a different way of thinking about everything in my life.” “Not only was it hanging out with Bill and with Elijah, but down to the people behind the camera and the people that made our swords and the people that dressed us in the morning, their influence over the past three years made me want to try and change huge facets of my life.”

FilmStew

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