Key
| TV/Radio/Net Appearance | Premiere | Filming/Performing | Other Event |
| Q&A, Conference, Convention, Signing | Awards Show | Party/Festival | Personal |
| United States | New Zealand | Europe | Elsewhere |
Gossip/unverified info will be marked in bold.
LOTR Castmember Timeline
| Canon | Timeline | 1980s 1980s | 1990s 1990s | 1999 1999 | 2000 2000 | 2001 2001 | 2002 2002 | 2003 2003 |
1999 |
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Date |
Location |
Event |
Castmembers |
Notes |
| 1/99? | London | Whale? | Dom | Dom: "I was in a play in London
and the casting directors came to see it. They asked me if I knew the
book and I did. Anyway I went off to do this job in France." |
| 1/28 | Los Angeles | Elijah's 18th birthday | Elijah | Elijah: "It was my first suprise party. Terrific. My best friends ordered my favorite food. And that is a barbecue from Austin, Texas, where we shot the Faculty. There's this place where you can order spare ribs and send them to LA by air mail. You just have to heat it up..." |
| ?/? | Los Angeles | Frodo Tape | Elijah | Director George
Huang, a personal friend of Elijah's, filmed his audition tape for the
Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Elijah: "So I [decided to do] my own tape, which I'd never done before, but I figured that this project deserved my own interpretation and my full attention. So I got a voice coach and worked on my accent for a little while, and then a few friends of mine got together and we went up to the Hollywood Hills after getting some costumes at Western Costume, and we shot the scenes like you would a film, [with] various angles and things. And we went that night to the Miramax offices and borrowed their Avid machine and edited it together, and the next day I brought the video into the casting office and I kind of let it go, just knowing that I'd put my best foot forward in terms of getting the role, and I would see what happened." |
| ?/? | Audition | Bernard | Bernard Hill made his own audition tape which he directed himself in a friend's barn. | |
| 6/7-8/? | Vancouver | Chain of Fools | Elijah | Principal shooting. Elijah left early for NZ. Currently at work on Pontus Lowenhielm and Patrik Von Krusenstjerna's Shiny New Enemies [renamed COF], with Salma Hayek and Jeff Goldblum. |
| ?/? | Los Angeles | Frodo Casting | Elijah | Elijah got the part of Frodo a few months after sending in his audition tape. |
| ?/? | Frodo casting rumor | Elijah | Aint-It-Cool-News breaks the news on Frodo's casting, but it is thought to be just another rumor. | |
| 6/? late | Los Angeles | Elijah and Sean meet | Elijah, Sean A | Elijah: "I hadn't met Sean before. I met him about four or five days before I flew to New Zealand for the first time. He was getting his wig fitted, as I needed to get mine fitted. I went to this hotel, and we kind of crossed paths in the lobby. Obviously we both knew who [the] other was. And we kind of stopped and looked at each other, and we just ran and gave each other a massive hug—and that was the first time I ever met him. It was this instant connection because we knew what we were about to embark on together." |
| 6/? late | New Zealand | Arrival in NZ | Elijah | |
| 7/8 | Frodo casting announced | Elijah | Elijah Wood Is First To Join Cast Of J.R.R. Tolkin's "The Lord Of The Rings" For New Line Cinema And Director Peter Jackson | |
| 7/9 | Sam casting announced | Sean A | ||
| 7/11 | Casting follow-up | Aint-It-Cool-News Michael DeLuca: "Look, the bottom line is no one is cast yet beyond who's been announced. Peter's passionate about one particular unknown for Aragorn [Stuart Towsend, who would eventually be replaced by Viggo Mortensen], and he's in the midst of convincing us. We're still waiting on a great choice for Gandalf [Ian McKellen], and there's a certain husband and wife team for Faramir and Galadriel that looks like it might work. [Rumor had it this was Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, both of whom eventually passed.]" |
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| 7/18? | St Valery-sur-Somme, Picardy coast, at the mouth of the River Somme, France | Monsignor Renard | Dom | Dom: "Five months later and my agent called to say, 'I don't want to excite you but they're quite interested in you for Lord of the Rings'. I was like, 'Omigod!'. Before I knew it I'd got the part and was packed and off to New Zealand. I was working on Monsignor Renard at the time so I had a week to come home, celebrate with my family and friends, move out of my house and pack for a year and a half." |
| 7/29 | Glasgow | Scotsman Interview | Billy | Skepticism about casting rumors. |
| 8/1-8/? | New Zealand | Hobbit Training | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A | Fencing, dialect, character brainstorming. |
| 8/28 | New Zealand | Billy's 31st birthday | Billy | |
| 9/? | New Zealand | Pre-Filming | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A | Training and general hobbit-bonding. Elijah: "We referred to each other as 'the hobbits.' Within the first month, we were those characters. We called ourselves the hobbits because we adopted the relationships that were important to those characters. We were always together. We were on set together, we went out for meals together, we loved being around each other." |
| 9/24 | New Zealand | Hobbit costume fittings | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A | Dom: "I was picked up at 8.30am to go to the studio. One hour in the gym, and then I went to see our dialect coaches. After lunch I had a costume session, where people were turning up to pass judgement. As usual in those situations, I tried to deflect the tension by dancing and doing monkey impressions. I thought my trousers and sleeves were too short, but aside form that, I love being the 'snappiest dresser' of the Hobbits." |
| 10/? | New Zealand | Farmer Maggot's Field to the Ferry shot, Bree, Isengard, Amon Hen | Shooting starts. Scenery shots? | |
| 10/7 | Main cast announced | New Line officially confirmed fourteen members of the principal cast (all but one of which had been discovered by (or leaked to?) Internet sites beforehand), and announced that filming would begin on October 11 in Wellington. Mainstream media picked up on the project for the first time, especially in New Zealand. | ||
| 10/11-10/15 | Mt. Victoria, Wellington | A Shortcut to Mushrooms | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A | First day of shooting is the scene on the road with
the mushrooms, Elijah farts when landed on. According to Elijah's E! interview,
the hobbits were generally "picked up" around 5 AM and brought
to the set for makeup and prosthetics. See Filming Quotes for more info. |
| 10/15 | Stuart Townsend leaves project; Viggo is called. | "After an exciting first week, however, including
the departure of actor Stuart Townsend from the project for unknown reasons,
things settled down, and news from the sets became scarce." "A few days after shooting had begun, Viggo Mortensen took a call from his agent at his modest suburban house in Venice, Los Angeles. The actor cast as Aragorn, 27 year old Irishman Stuart Townsend (Shooting Fish, Queen of the Damned), had been fired by Jackson due to "creative differences" and the role was being offered to Mortensen. Mortensen had not read the books and despite the entreaties of his Tolkien-savvy, 11 year old son Henry, was unsure about plunging unprepared into a protracted shoot in a foreign country. "I guess in the end I did it because I would feel that I had been chicken shit really. I had to leave the next day, so I'm on the plane reading, looking at this gigantic book and thinking, 'What the hell have I done?"" |
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| 10/18-10/25 | Fort Dorset, Wellington; Stone Film Studios, Miramar | Bree exteriors; interiors | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A | |
| 10/19 | Weathertop | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A, Viggo | Three days and a crash course in sword fighting later, he was on a grassy set in a Wellington studio, defending the four hobbits played by Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan from an attack by the Black Riders. It was the first scene in a schedule whose staggering complexity would keep the actors on call six days a week for the next 15 months.” We’d have Sunday afternoon to do laundry and have a beer," Mortensen recalls, "and then before you knew it you were back on the battlefield." | |
| 10/20-10/21 | Manakau | Brandywine crossing | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A | Sinking raft, Dom's splinter. |
| 10/28-10/30 | Harcourt Park, Upper Hutt | Isengard deforestation | ||
| 10/? | Queenstown | Stormy plane trip | Dom | Dom: "Just had a 'near-life' experience. On a DC-10 we tried to get to Queenstown in a storm. It was all wine and laughter until the plane started to violently jolt up and down. Whole glasses of wine hit the ceiling, and when I turned round to see that the air hostess had passed out, I realised that we were in deep s***. We landed, had to unload the plane ourselves, then drove to our hotel. I did yoga for an hour just to stop my head from whirring like a food processor." |
| 10/? | Buckleberry ferry, singing dwarves, exploding tree | TORN report? | ||
| 11/7 | Wanaka, South Island | Nazgul horse chase | 2nd Unit | |
| 11/6-11/7 | Queenstown | Flooding | Orlando, Sean B | Peter: "Two of the actors, Sean Bean
and Orlando Bloom, have been caught between two landslides and are now trapped
in a tiny town in the middle of the South Island. They have been taken in
by a kindly woman who has offered them food and a bed. They were last reported
to be cooking spaghetti and cracking into a bottle of red wine." Orlando: "I took a car trip down towards the South Island with Sean Bean. We were filming down there, but Sean's not into flying. And as we were driving, torrential rain started pouring down. You've never seen so much rain. I was videoing it and thinking, 'This is insane.' It didn't stop for, like, 12 hours. And after nine hours of heavy rain, the roads just started to wash away. Then we saw a massive landslide coming right towards us. We spun the car around, but we ran straight into another one, further up the road. So we pulled into this petrol station where there was already a queue of people. And we managed to find a little cottage, where they let us stay. They had to carry us out in a helicopter, in all this torrential rain, which was kind of hairy. Sean was gutted. He'd done this whole drive just to avoid the flight." Sean B: "I'm not a very good flier, though I'm getting better. It's the turbulence which really gets me. Orlando and I decided to drive and take the ferry instead. The only problem was Orlando's propensity for shopping. He had to stop at every shop to get Christmas presents. It was pouring with rain, so I was saying: 'Look, we've got to get going or there's going to be a landslide'. And sure enough, there was. We turned back to find another one so we were stuck in the middle of nowhere. They sent a chopper to airlift us out - even worse than a Dakota! It was still raining and we were flying through mountain passes and the windscreen wipers were going like mad. I said: 'Can't you just drop us there in that field?', but they wouldn't. I was gripping Orlando's kneecap so hard I must have nearly broken it. He was saying: 'It's OK' but he still takes the piss out of me for that." Sean B: "We were travelling down by road from the top of the south island, from Wellington to Queenstown, and it's about a 10 hour journey, and it just happened that we had a lot of water...a lot of rainfall...and the road we were on was only a two lane road, and banks collapsed behind us and in front of us...and we were sort of stuck in this little place for a couple of days...me and Orlando Bloom.... We were on the phone a lot...wondering when a helicopter was going to come and take us out." |
| 11/9 | Queenstown | Flooding | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Orlando, Viggo | Peter: "It is late 1999 in Queenstown,
New Zealand, two days after record rainfall caused the worst flooding in
the history of the district. We have suffered some setbacks; the weather
has stuffed the schedule." Dom: "Queenstown's flooded, which means that the river scenes may never be shot. Viggo rang this morning and asked if I wanted to go fishing. I said, "Why don't you just throw your rod out the window?" The water is about three feet high outside the reception area. Drove to Arrowtown with Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood and played cops and robbers in the forest. Also, Billy Boyd and I went round to six vineyards in a day. Not a good idea." |
| 11/10 | Evening Post Interview | Billy, Dom | Billy has yet to read the trilogy. "Management of the Miramar-based $360 million project finally allowed two of its hobbits to be interviewed yesterday although Frodo, played by star Elijah Wood, is still a no-no. The post was allowed to talk to Billy Boyd, who plays Frodo's pal Pippin, and Dominic Monaghan, who plays Merry, during a break in filming. The two are the first actors to speak to the media since filming began under security in Wellington last month. But no photographs were allowed, as they were still dressed as the hairy-footed hobbits described in JRR Tolkien's classic trilogy." "Meanwhile, Conservation Minister Nick Smith said today that consent had been given for filming on several areas of public conservation land in the South Island. Filming could occur over the next couple of months in the Fiordland, the Te Anau area, the Wakatipu basin near Queenstown and the Mt Owen area near Murchison." |
|
| 11/? | Te Anau, South Island | Various | Billy, Dom, Elijah, John, Liv, Orlando, Sean A, Sean B, Viggo | Kawaru river substituted for Rauros on the Anduin. Cast trapped on Te Anau by flooding. Night shoots in caves on Mt. Owen, near Murchison. |
| 11/15 | Wakatipu, near Queenstown; Kepler Mire, Te Anau basin | "Major" hobbit scene; Dead Marshes (3rd unit) | ||
| 11/26 | Aragorn battling Orcs | Viggo | ||
| 12/? | Boromir's death | Billy, Dom, John, Orlando, Sean B, Viggo | ||
| 12/? | Ford of Bruinen | Elijah, Liv | ||
| 12/? | Closeburn | Stunt work | ||
| 12/8 | Dom's 23rd birthday | Dom | ||
| 12/8-12/12 | Hinuera | Hobbiton exteriors | ||
| 12/11 | Amon Hen, Prancing Pony | Billy, Dom, Elijah, Sean A, Viggo | Frodo's escape from Amon Hen, Strider battling Uruk-Hai, Prancing Pony interiors shot. | |
| 12/11-12/12 | Paradise Farm, 90 min from Queenstown | Lothlorien | Billy, Dom, Elijah, John, Orlando, Peter, Sean A, Sean B, Viggo | There's flooding; the country is wild. These scenes were cut - they showed the Fellowship fleeing Orcs through the forest after the Moria sequence. Orlando, John, Sean B., Viggo, Peter, and the scaled-down hobbit standins are there in the morning; the hobbits show up in the afternoon. |
| 12/13-12/31 | Holiday Break! | Continues through January 2000. See January for details. | ||
| Canon | Timeline | 1980s 1980s | 1990s 1990s | 1999 1999 | 2000 2000 | 2001 2001 | 2002 2002 | 2003 2003 |