Liv Tyler may not be thousands of years old like her character Arwen, Lady of Rivendell, in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, but it is her birthday today, July 1. To celebrate, we gathered little-known facts about the movies from old interviews with the actress and her cast members.
1. Tyler thought that elves had no “private parts.”
Talking about how she felt the species she played in “Lord of the Rings” was a bit mysterious, Tyler told UK’s Sunday Express in 2002: “They don’t sleep, they don’t eat, we don’t even know if they have any private parts.”
“Maybe they’re like Ken and Barbie dolls. You know, you lift up their clothes and there’s nothing there.”
2. Which might explain why, when Tyler first received the Arwen doll prototype, she stripped it naked to see if it were anatomically correct.
Image Left: 648 Toys. Image Right: “Lord of the Rings.”
Tyler spoke with Pavement Magazine in 2002 about the Arwen toy modeled after her, saying, “The first thing I did was take all its clothes off, like you do when you’re a kid.”
The interviewer asked if the toy was anatomically correct, to which Tyler responded: “The boobs were pretty good. They were bigger than mine.”
She then continued, “But then I couldn’t get the clothes back on … So I had to send the Arwen doll back in the box naked to New Line. I called to say, ‘Look, I’m really sorry. I’m not weird but I couldn’t get the dress back on.”
3. The actors in the Fellowship got “LOTR” tattoos together.
Image: “Pirates of the Caribbean”
IGN interviewed Tyler and Orlando Bloom in 2003 and asked about the rumor that members of the Fellowship got tattoos together. Bloom responded that the rumor was true, and then showed that his was on his wrist.
“It says nine, in Elvish, which stands [for the fact that] there were nine in the Fellowship,” said Bloom.
But actually, only eight of the lead actors who played the members of the Fellowship got tattoos, as John Rhys-Davies — who played Gimli — let his stunt double get the tattoo instead.
Elijah Wood told ABC News in 2001 that the group “went ahead and did that about a week before we finished.”
4. Peter Jackson made Tyler act with a neon pink golf ball, which the special effects crew later replaced with other characters in the scene.
Image Left: “Lord of the Rings.” Image Right: Tacki-Mac
“For the whole sequence, I’m supposed to be talking and reacting to King Wraith,” Tyler explained to Starlog Magazine in 2001 of a certain scene she filmed, “but I was really talking to a neon pink golf ball on a dolly, with two cameras on me and Peter saying what was going to be happening. I just had to make it all up, react to it and try to make it real.”
Tyler later elaborated in the 2003 IGN interview. “I was like acting with a pink golf ball all the time. And Pete would do this incredible … like, really big grand explanations of what was going on,” she said. “He always wanted us out of breath. I was always doing laps around the studio.”
5. The entire New Zealand army was rumored to appear as extras, but got called to action at the last minute.
Image Left: WikiCommons. Image Right: “Lord of the Rings”
A New Women Magazine feature on Tyler in 2001 mentioned this in the intro: “a cast of extras which almost included the entire New Zealand army (they were sent to East Timor at the last minute to serve as peacekeepers).”
Though, it would seem that at least some of the New Zealand army were used as extras, as an BBCarticle from 2001 revealed that people felt these acting soldiers were being exploited with too little pay from the production.
Eleven years later, a New Zealand soldier hosted a Reddit AMA and revealed that he was an extra in the movie.
6. Bloom was worried what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought about Legolas sliding on a shield.
For a “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” press junket, Bloom was asked what he would like to ask Tolkien if he had the chance.
Bloom joked, “If he minded that I slid down the stairs on the Uruk-hai shield. Whether that was an elven thing or not.”
Bloom, who played Legolas, said he was proud of the scene and thought that it worked for the movie, but was concerned some fans might’ve found it “not very Tolkien-esque.”
7. Tyler learned how to say her Elvish lines phonetically for the movie, but didn’t learn the language.
Image: “Lord of the Rings”
During an interview with Flaunt Magazine, Tyler called the Elvish language “amazing,” adding: “It’s a legitimate language. There are only a certain amount of people in the world who can speak it, like Oxford professors and what not. It’s such a beautiful language too, it’s really brilliant.”
In a 2002 interview with Total Film Magazine, however, Tyler admitted that she did not become one of those few people who could speak Elvish. “I didn’t learn Elvish, like I would learn Italian or something,” Tyler said. “But I spent a lot of time learning the vowel sounds.”
To Empire Magazine Tyler explained that “there was basically a 1-800-Help-An-Elf number. There was this man, I think he was an Oxford professor. We would call him for a translation. I would always make a note of the line with an English translation next to it so that I understood what I was saying.”
8. Tyler’s scenes would give her nightmares about orcs at night.
Image: “Lord of the Rings”
In 2011, Tyler told the BBC about her nightmares, explaining in depth how her house did not help matters.
“When I first went down there [to New Zealand], I was living alone in this big house on this beautiful cliff by the sea,” Tyler recounted. “It’s really windy in Wellington, all the time, and the houses aren’t really made for it. They’re little beach cottages. Everything shakes all the time.”
Tyler continued, “From getting really involved with the film, and reading the books, I started having nightmares. One night, I woke up and I was sick, and I had a fever. I heard tap, tap, tap on the bedroom door; it was actually the wind. Seeing things that were scary, that was hard for me.”
9. Removing the elven ears was surprisingly painful.
Image: “Lord of the Rings”
“It’s not painful when they’re on but to get them off is painful,” Tyler told Pavement Magazine in 2002, which described her as “wincing at the memory.”
Tyler continued, “They’re put on with glue and witch hazel and all this other stuff and then airbrushed … Having them taken off everyday, skin ripping off your ears, really hurt.”
10. When Jackson first showed the actors footage, Tyler’s reaction was, “Oh my God.”
At a wrap party, Jackson showed the actors a few minutes of almost finished footage so that they would know what to expect from all their extensive work in front of a green screen. Tyler told Starlog Magazine in 2001 that she was particularly excited when she saw this footage.
“I kept screaming out and going, ‘Oh, my God!’ I was really reacting to it. It was spectacular.”
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