When Dominic Monaghan was a kid, he lived and breathed Star Wars. “I would watch Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back over and over again,” says the actor who’s most widely known as Merry, one of the heroic Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. “I knew the first 45 minutes to an hour of Star Wars word for word. I just obsessed over the film.”

This childhood obsession, in fact, is what sparked Monaghan’s desire to become an actor. “I realized it was what I wanted to do, to have that fantastic gift of being able to take normal people away from the world we all live in and transport them somewhere else. Whether it’s space (as in Star Wars) or Middle Earth (the setting of Lord of the Rings) or an island in the middle of nowhere (the setting of his current hit TV series, Lost), that’s the thing that turns me on about my job.”

Monaghan’s love of Star Wars is so profound, he actually finds it hard to comprehend that he was part of a movie trilogy that measures up in every way, both in terms of box-office success and artistic achievement. “I don’t think anybody knew that Lord of the Rings was going to be as well-received as it has been,” he says. “I don’t think any of us know even now. I mean, I get together with Billy Boyd and Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen and we’re all still slightly bemused by the whole thing. We can’t quite process what’s going on when people come over and say, ‘Star Wars used to be my favorite film trilogy. Now it’s Lord of the Rings.’ I don’t feel for one minute that it’s on the level with Star Wars, simply because I’ve not processed it. I don’t think of it in that way yet.”

But he had better get used to it. Because public appreciation for the three Lord of the Rings movies — The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) — is liable to deepen with the passage of time. The movies collected a combined 17 Academy Awards, including a record 11 Oscars for the final installment. The Return of the King also owns the distinction of being one of only two films to earn more than $1 billion at the box office worldwide (the other is 1997′s Titanic). The Rings movies are masterpieces of riveting story (based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary classic), compelling characters and visuals that, while spectacularly larger than life and state of the art, never became a distraction (as has been the case with the more recent Star Wars installments).

Monaghan says he knew from the outset that the movies would be good, but he had no clue they would be THIS good. “The first thing I did when I got to New Zealand was walk around the world that Peter Jackson had created,” the actor recalls. “To see these sets, to see where Bilbo lived, to see where Frodo lived, to see all of these things, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that Pete lived and breathed Lord of the Rings and the last thing he wanted to do was to do a bad job with his favorite book. I mean, it was Pete’s favorite book of all time and he wanted to make his favorite film of all time. So the quality was something that was very evident right from the start.”

The Lord of the Rings is a tough act to follow. But Monaghan has found a worthy successor on television, as one of the stars of the ABC series Lost, one of the most acclaimed new shows of this season, in which he plays a marginally famous, drug-using rock-and-roller. But as was the case with The Lord of the Rings, he’s trying to keep his big dreams for the show somewhat in check. “You can’t help but project, especially when you’re hanging around with a bunch of actors who all hope for the best,” he says. “It’s difficult not to get involved in those kinds of conversations. But I don’t do work for that reason. Always you hope it’s successful. Always you hope it goes. But I’m acutely aware of how rewarding the experience has been so far. The character I play is a great character. The work that I’ve done has been really challenging.

TNT

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