Cool article on final screentime for the actors...

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Bloom saw the demise of his precious weapon as an eerie omen that his experience was coming to a close - even if they were able to easily replace it for the last few shots. “Two takes before last it’s like, ooooooowwwwweeee - it’s coming to an end. We had doubles and I used the double different times as well, but I couldn’t believe it, I was devastated.” Bloom embraces those final emotions one last time sitting at the roundtable in front of the eager journalists poring over his feelings and jokingly recounting that difficult moment. “I was like my bow, my bow.”

For both Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan, who as Merry and Pippin experience life-changing transformations (both on and off screen) as intense as any of their marquee-name costars, the final shot was one of third-act triumph rather than the sort of tomfoolery that got them into trouble so frequently in the first two films. “My last shot of principal photography was really dull,” explained Boyd, who shows his color in the final moments of Return To the King. “[It was] a blue screen shot climbing up to like the beacon, looking around the edge of a thing that's not even in the movie. And I remember being quite disappointed that it was my last shot.”

Thankfully, the reshoots allowed Boyd to enjoy a more fitting conclusion to the experience. “My last shot was killing the Orc that's about to kill Gandalf (in ROTK). I thought, that's a great shot to have shot. So that was, kind of looking at my sword with the blood on it, and I thought ‘that's great.’”

Monaghan suggests that the actual on-set time was boring, but for audiences who will witness his seemingly single-handed defeat of a mammoth adversary, the end result was anything but. “[It was] going through the Oliphant and slicing the legs with my sword, which is blue screen. There was no one there. Everyone else was on Stage A and I was on like Stage like D with Miranda.”

With the physical tumult of shooting having been completed, Monaghan quickly realized that the emotional one had yet to be conquered. “We finished it and then I walked over to Stage A and saw Pete and Fran and they knew that I'd wrapped, and they gave you the opportunity to try an impossible task of summing up four years of your life in front of all these people.”

Expectedly, it was an enormously difficult task to encapsulate four years of one’s life into a five- or ten minute speech. “I tried to get across more than anything else that the experience I'd had changed the way that my life had been leading, and moved it on a 90 degree angle to a different way of thinking about everything in my life.”

“Not only was it hanging out with Bill and with Elijah, but down to the people behind the camera and the people that made our swords and the people that dressed us in the morning, their influence over the past three years made me want to try and change huge facets of my life.”

Jackson, as ringleader of so many hellos and goodbyes through the four-year process, found each and every one of them as touching as the last. “Back in May and June, when we were shooting pickups and we had most of the actors in for a few days of shooting, we had like 15 farewells. For each actor it was emotional because it was either Elijah's last day or Liv's last day or Ian or Viggo and we'd go through the day shooting.”

“We had our shot list and we'd get to the last shot, and we didn't say this is the last shot,” adds Jackson. “It was unspoken, and we'd set it up and I'd say cut.” The filmmaker had a way of verbally acknowledging each concluding sequence, one that the actors weren’t aware of but which became familiar to the crew as the farewells spread through the remainder of the cast’s set-ups.

“The [actors would] be waiting- do I say ‘let's go for another take,’ or do I say ‘check the gate,’” he explains. “If I said check the gate, that was the door slamming shut, and I got what I wanted. We had to go through it 15 times each day. It was a traumatic period of shooting, actually.”

“We had a party for each person individually as they finished and a blooper reel,” adds Jackson. “For me, they waited until the wrap party. Of course, most of the actors had already left because they had finished earlier. By the time we had the wrap party there weren't too many people around other than the crew. Then they had a blooper of me. They put it to music-they had some Beatles music and cut it together.”

Jackson, who was in many ways the workhorse that determinedly pulled the Lord Of the Rings’ cart from its mired history of questionable adaptations and commercial failures, received a gift at film’s end that seemed apropos of the great effort he bestowed upon Tolkien’s lauded, much-protected work: “We tried to give most of the actors a prop that was synonymous with their characters. In most cases it was a sword for the guys.”

With Liv, we gave her a dress and her ears. I'd play these cameos, and he cameo I did in Fellowship of the Ring was in the street of Bree (sp?). I was eating a carrot, so they gave me a framed carrot.”

“I thought, Viggo got a sword, how come I can't have a sword. I wish I had done a cameo with a sword. I didn't, so I got a carrot.”

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final in FilmStew.com’s trilogy of celebrity interview features about Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, a film that is very likely going to be a main Academy Award contender for Best Picture of 2003.