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Crossing Middle-earth is hard.

Filming a movie about crossing Middle-earth is downright treacherous.

The Lord of the Rings cast went through a lot during the production of the fantasy saga, and they have the battle scars to prove it – literally!  

“I’ve got a permanent scar across my chest here,” Dominic Monaghan shares during the Lord of the Rings reunion panel at C2E2 2025.  “I wore a fat suit in the first film, and it was heavy. You’ve got a bigger gut and over the course of six months or so I wore this fat suit, and it’s created a permanent scar. I said the same thing to Pete Jackson, and he just kind of giggled away.”

Billy Boyd got the same response from Jackson when his hobbit feet permanently dislocated one of his toes. “I don’t like working at night shoots,” Boyd says. “Night is for sleeping. And sometimes on a movie they’ll make you do scenes and all that when you should be sleeping. We’re doing a scene, and it’s outside the Door of Moria, when Gandalf is trying to remember how to get in. The scene is basically us waiting before the monster comes and takes Frodo. And it was in a car park.”

“They just filled it with water, and it was freezing,” Boyd continues. “We wore these hobbit feet, as you know, but they were like sponge, which is great for running around. It made you feel like a hobbit. But they were sponges, so if they got wet, they just came into your feet, and you were just standing in cold water, and it was just getting later and later, and I was getting more and more tired, and my feet were freezing. And I think to myself, as Dom will confirm, I’m quite a hard man, I can take anything. But this day, it was so cold, and I had to say, ‘Look, after this take, I need to take these feet off.’”

It was then that he discovered his toes had shifted. “One of them is now underneath the other one, and I blame the hobbit feet for that. And I’ve told Pete Jackson about that actually. He was really interested, but then he just laughed. I thought there would be compensation,” Boyd jokes.

Elijah Wood recalls a time when he wore a wetsuit that had been modified so much that it became redundant. “In an alternate version of the scene at the end of Fellowship, I was the one to fall in the water and almost drown, and Sam saved me. And they rewrote it, and we shot it as it is in the film, but the original version was me falling in and Sam saving me. And I had to be in a wetsuit.”

“With the hobbit clothing, I couldn’t have a full wetsuit on, so they had to cut the wetsuit near my knee, and at various other places around the neck as well. It’s not doing its job. A wetsuit is only functional if it can cover your entire body and create a seal. If there’s no seal created, it’s useless. So, I was in that water uninterrupted down and up for about 45 minutes, and I turned a shade of blue. I took me an hour and a half to two hours to warm up.”

The cast made it clear that despite their hardships, they still love Peter Jackson, and enjoyed their time on the film. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if they demanded hazard pay in their contracts going forward.

You can watch There and Back Again: A Lord of the Rings Cast Reunion from C2E2 2025's Main Stage (guaranteed by CGC x JSA) for yourself as part of Popverse's all-encompassing coverage of C2E2 2025.

Did you miss a C2E2 Main Stage panel? Don't worry, we're filming it all thanks to our partners at CGC x JSA -  our official authenticator & grading partner. Here is the C2E2 2025 panel list and release schedule.