For anyone attending the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy theatrical re-release, pay attention to the iconic Mines of Moria set piece in “The Fellowship of the Ring” and you may notice for the first time that Viggo Mortensen‘s Aragorn is only filmed from the side for much of the sequence. That’s because Mortensen got into a surfing accident in the middle of production and showed up to set with a bulging, swollen black eye.
“The thing with these movies, of course, is we shot all three of them at the same time and then in a mixed-up kind of way,” Jackson says in his video introduction to the “Fellowship” re-release (via Entertainment Weekly). “So one day we’d be shooting a bit from ‘The Fellowship,’ then that would be on Monday. On Tuesday, we’d shoot a scene from [second film] ‘The Two Towers,’ on Wednesday, back to Fellowship again, on Thursday to [final film] ‘The Return of the King.’ So it was just one film really for us.”
“So in the mines of Moria scene, too, the other thing I remember, we all show up to shoot that scene,” Jackson continues. “And Viggo had been out with the Hobbits during the weekend, and he’d been surfing, and he had sustained an injury surfing, like the board had flipped in the air and whacked him in the face. So he comes in, and he’s got his eye is bulged out, black eye, shut, like a boxer swollen, and he says, ‘I’m sorry, Peter. I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Oh God.’ So you’ll see that all I could do is to shoot him from the side. I couldn’t shoot [head on].”
Mortensen played Aragorn in all three of Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movie. Jackson is returning to Middle-earth as the producer of a new “Lord of the Rings” movie that is going to be directed by Gollum actor Andy Serkis. The movie, “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” goes into production this year and has a Dec. 2027 theatrical release. Mortensen told GQ UK in 2024 that he would not be opposed to returning as Aragorn if it made sense.
“I don’t know exactly what the story is, I haven’t heard,” he said at the time. “Maybe I’ll hear about it eventually. I like playing that character. I learned a lot playing the character. I enjoyed it a lot. I would only do it if I was right for it in terms of, you know, the age I am now and so forth. I would only do it if I was right for the character. It would be silly to do it otherwise.”
“Lord of the Rings” is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its trilogy kickoff with nationwide re-releases of “Fellowship of the Ring” on Jan. 16, “The Two Towers” on Jan. 17 and “The Return of the King” on Jan. 18. The movies have generated $5 million in domestic presales, with roughly 407,000 tickets sold so far, according to Fathom Entertainment.