One LORD OF THE RINGS Orc Was Designed to Look Like Harvey Weinstein
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is among the most well-made and most beloved films of all time. They tell the epic story laid out in the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, and it truly feels like no one could have adapted them as masterfully as director Peter Jackson, but he had a difficult road to making them.
According to THR, the history goes, “Miramax acquired the rights to the J. R. R. Tolkien books in the mid-1990s and even put a few million dollars into development. However, after some time, it became clear the three films were not going to get made the way producer-director Peter Jackson and partner Fran Walsh envisioned, so they asked co-founder Harvey Weinstein to be allowed to shop the films at other studios.”
The studio agreed to allow Jackson and Walsh access to the rights, but only under the circumstances that they get backing right away, and whoever they got to produce had to sign on to make all three films back to back, going against the normal Hollywood route of waiting to see how the first film does in the box office. That was a tall order. Jackson eventually met with Bob Shaye at New Line Cinema, where an unlikely deal was finally struck. But it was clear that Miramax head Harvey Weinstein did not think his conditions were going to be met.
So, as LOTR star Elijah Wood told Dax Shepard in his recent sit down on the Armchair Expert Podcast:
“It’s funny, this was recently spoken about because Dom [Monaghan] and Bill [Boyd, who played Hobbits Merry and Pippin in the trilogy] have a podcast, The Friendship Onion. They were talking to Sean Astin [who played Samwise] about his first memory of getting to New Zealand. He had seen these orc masks. And one of the orc masks — and I remember this vividly — was designed to look like Harvey Weinstein as a sort of a fuck you.”
Wood added, while he, Shepard, and Armchair Expert co-host Monica Padman were laughing at the reveal:
“I think that is OK to talk about now, the guy is fucking incarcerated. Fuck him.”
That’s hilarious! Not only was Weinstein an awful person to work with, but as we all know now, he was a garbage human being who sexually assaulted many women, and was the perfect blueprint for the ogre-like orcs in the LOTR universe. No offense to orcs, of course.
But now the hunt is on. Can you find the orc that looks like Weinstein?