Elijah Wood Revealed That One Of The “Lord Of The Rings” Orcs Was Made To Look Like Harvey Weinstein – BuzzFeed

Look — you’ve watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, what, a thousand times?

But you probably had no idea that one of the orc designs for the film was, apparently, inspired by disgraced film producer and alleged rapist Harvey Weinstein.

At least, that’s what LOTR star Elijah Wood revealed on a recent episode of Dax Shepard‘s Armchair Expert podcast.

Wood actually said that the subject also recently came up on The Friendship Onion podcast, which is hosted by fellow LOTR co-stars Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd.

“They were talking to Sean Astin about his first memory of getting to New Zealand for the first time,” he said. “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.”

According to Deadline, there’s context here: Originally, the LOTR films were supposed to be made at Weinstein’s production company Miramax. But Harvey didn’t want director Peter Jackson to make three films — so Jackson made them at New Line instead, and the rest is history.

And history is precisely is why Wood felt so comfortable sharing the story with Shepard: “I think it’s okay to talk about this now. He’s fucking incarcerated.”