NEED TO KNOW
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy involved special effects, fight scenes and soaring vistas, but for star Sean Bean, there was one thing that tripped him up: helicopter rides.
Bean, 66, opened up, alongside LOTR costar Viggo Mortensen, in the new issue of Empire magazine in honor of the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring this year. The first of Peter Jackson’s three films, which adapted the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, was released Dec. 19, 2001.
The outlet asked Bean about the “few issues” he had with helicopters while making the movies. Bean, who played Boromir in the films, confirmed, “Yeah, I was very scared of flying at the time.”
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Mortensen, 67, noted, “And there were a lot of helicopters on that show.” Mortensen starred in the trilogy as Aragorn.
Mortensen remembered specifically a “great scene” where Bean’s Boromir was tempted by the ring, and it was filmed high in the mountains in the snow. The LOTR movies were filmed in New Zealand, taking advantage of the country’s wide range of terrain.
“That was on a kind of glacier, wasn’t it?” Bean said. “It was really, really high up.”
Mortensen remembered that the first day, they went by helicopter. “It was a 40-minute ride and there were a lot of downdrafts and stuff,” he said to Bean. “The helicopter dropped several times and you were white-knuckling it. You were horrified. You said to me, ‘I really don’t like this. I had to take some pills to just even take the plane from England to New Zealand. I won’t be doing it again.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, there’s a lot of places where we’re gonna have to do this.’ ”
Bean had a way around it, however. “But he didn’t do it again!” Mortensen remembered. “The next morning, we had a scene up on a mountain outside Queenstown, and he said, ‘I’ll get up at two in the morning, I don’t care, and I’ll walk up the mountain.’ Which is what he did!”
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The Game of Thrones star said, “I was in full costume and I set off before everyone else, but I got there about the same time as everybody else.” Still, his costar added, “But you were pretty tired…”
Bean didn’t mind. “It was such an adventure, you know? In every sense of the word,” he said. Not just the script and the film, he said but “also our shenanigans and our adventures as people were… It was so unusual. I’ve never known anything like it.”
Bean’s Boromir died in the first film (though he had an appearance in 2002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers). Deaths are a frequent occurrence for characters played by the actor, who also famously played Ned Stark on Game of Thrones. Bean told The Sun in 2019 that he eventually started turning down roles where his character died, calling them “predictable.”
But Mortensen did talk to Empire about how much they love Bean’s death scene in Fellowship of the Ring, which sees Boromir and Aragorn finally come together in the former’s final moments.
“That scene, I have to say, no offense to anybody else or any other part of the trilogy, but that’s maybe my favourite scene,” Mortensen said. “It’s such a beautiful scene. And there are no effects, there are no imaginary monsters. It’s just two people who have a connection in terms of their ethnicity — you know, Gondor and all that — but they’ve been at odds. They’ve been kinda butting heads until then. And then there’s just such a strong connection.”
Next year will see the release of a new Lord of the Rings film, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. That film will feature the return of Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Elijah Wood as Frodo and is directed by Andy Serkis, who portrayed Gollum in the original series.
