Brush with Fame

Originally I was going to just email this anecdote to Emily, but I figured that others might be interested as well.

A few days ago I was eating lunch with some coworkers and the subject of Lord of the Rings came up. Not surprising given that we are in Wellington, home of Peter Jackson, his studios, and most of the LOTR filming locations. One of my coworkers, Albert, casually threw into the discussion, "Oh yeah, I was in that." Awesome! I had lunch (actually, multiple lunches) with a movie star!

Albert said he was an extra in the Helms Deep battle. He's a pretty big guy so I can see how it would not take much makeup/costuming to make him look the part of a Middle Earth warrior or whatever. Unfortunately he said that you can't see him at all in the movie. Not too surprising, but still disappointing. It guess this whole movie extra thing is not really that exciting for Wellintonians because apparently everyone and their mom who was living in Wellington during the filming got to be an extra, but it's still cool to me.

Albert did give us all the dirt (or at least as much dirt as an extra can get), so of course I have to share:

• Filming for his part lasted two days, and he said that mostly it was a lot of standing around and being cold.
  
• He did get to meet Peter Jackson, but the extent of the meeting was Jackson shaking his hand and saying thank you.
• Viggo Mortensen kept everyone entertained by yelling "For Frodo!" overdramatically.
• He did not get to meet/see Liv Tyler
  
• Overall he found the actors just to be regular guys
• ... although, he said that Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom were way too pretty and that their faces were so chiseled that they didn't look real.
  
• He had to sign pages and pages of confidentiality agreements. They were not kidding about keeping it under wraps.
  

So now that I have met Albert I am probably one step closer to Kevin Bacon. And I'll be on the lookout for more fame brushes, especially given that Peter Jackson's the hot item in movies right now. Denzel Washington was here last week in talks with him, and I can only hope that they will begin filming on that movie before I leave.

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This is how ubiquitous Lord of the Rings stuff is around Wellington: I came across this while just taking a walk one day. They're everywhere.