Elijah Wood Explains Harvey Weinstein's Secret 'Lord of the Rings' Cameo

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is chock-full of so many sexy people and people-adjacent creatures, all packed into a tight eleven hours and thirty-six minutes of screen time. There’s the Aragorn of it all, and then the elves are very sexy, and some people are into hobbits, and I think that Sméagol and Déagol have real chemistry (yes, I know they are cousins, but come on). But you know who is not sexy? The orcs, this infernal list aside. That’s why, it seems, one of them was given the face of Kate & Leopold producer and prolific rapist Harvey Weinstein.

Frodo Baggins, née Elijah Wood, shared a very amusing anecdote on Dax Shephard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, in which he revealed that an orc got Weinsteined as a “sort of fuck you” to the disgraced Hollywood mogul.

“This was recently spoken about because Dom [Dominic Monaghan] and Bill [Boyd] … were talking to Sean Astin about his first memory of getting to New Zealand [for filming],” said Wood. “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.”

“I think that is OK to talk about now,” Wood added. “The guy is fucking incarcerated. Fuck him.”

Unfortunately, the orc mask was not created as a sly, silicone nod to Weinstein’s criminal predilections (which the orcs are allegedly into as well; consider the tragic tale of Celebrian), or to his sexual harassment of LOTR star Cate Blanchett. It was rather made as a small rebellion against Weinstein’s annoying pre-production antics. He insisted that LOTR director Peter Jackson sublimate his vision and adapt J.R.R. Tolkein’s books into just one movie, and so Jackson leaked his own scripts and got another producer onboard instead. The rest is $2.92 billion-grossing, critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning history.

Wood did not specify which orc it was. Perhaps it was the one that chokes to death on his own blood.