During the filming of a scene in The Return of the King, an actor was injured so badly by a prop that he had to go to the hospital. MeinMMO tells you what’s behind it.
Who is the person you are talking about? Almost everyone has heard of Viggo Mortensen’s (Aragorn) injury during the filming of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The story has practically become legendary. In one scene, Aragorn believes that Merry and Pippin were brutally killed by orcs. In his anger, he kicks the helmet of an Uruk-hai, breaking two toes. Orlando Bloom also injured himself when he fell from his horse and broke several ribs.
But the two were by no means the only ones on the set of Lord of the Rings who were injured. During the filming of The Return of the King, Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) was not spared either.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – Trailer (German)
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Elijah Wood injured himself during the spider scene
How did Elijah Wood get injured? In the third part, Frodo is hit by Shelob’s stinger (the scary giant spider), which seriously wounds him and brings him close to death. However, during the filming of this key scene, Elijah Wood suffered a real injury from a prop object that represented the stinger. This information was later revealed in the Extended Edition DVD, where Wood and his colleague Sean Astin (who plays Sam) talk about the background to this scene.
How bad was it? Wood describes how the puncture from the prop object was not only extremely painful, but actually resulted in a serious injury that required medical attention. The injury was so serious that Wood had to spend several days in the hospital recovering – before he could return to the set.
Wood and Astin even joked during this time about using appendicitis as an excuse to stay in the hospital. The irony was that they speculated whether this incident could actually have led to Elijah Wood’s real appendicitis in 2003. Sean Astin was not spared from injuries on set either. At the end of the first film, he walked into a river and stepped on a pane of glass. Ouch! Did you also know? One of the most epic images in the Lord of the Rings film was not makeup, but a real injury.