The Four OG Hobbits Reunited for the First Time in 10 Years

I am desperately trying to remember how to drink water like a normal person. I’m sitting in a small canteen surrounded by celebrities who have just finished their workday at Calgary Expo 2022. There are some faces I recognise, others I don’t — but the one person who stands out the most is Elijah Wood, who is patiently waiting to meet with Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, and Billy Boyd for the first time in over a decade.

Boyd elaborates on this a little later on, telling IGN that there have been “a lot of threes, but there hasn’t been a four.” The only reason they’re getting together now is because they’re about to embark on a seven-show tour across North America for the first official hobbit reunion in more than 10 years. Before they go up on stage for the debut panel though, I have somehow been given exactly 15 minutes to interview them.

Eventually the other hobbits arrive, with Astin showing up last because he was determined to sign an autograph for everyone queuing for his booth. But now the legendary heroes of The Shire are sitting at my table. Monaghan takes out a box and Boyd tells Astin that a fan at the expo has made a pipe for him. Astin instead takes out a jar, explaining that Monaghan and Boyd are going to sample its contents on their podcast, The Friendship Onion.

“It’s a dill, chicken dipping sauce type thing,” says Monaghan. “No, no — just take the f*cking pipe!”

“He’s getting angry,” says Boyd. “We should all smoke a pipe tonight around the fire. Pipeweed is legal in Canada.”

“The finest pipeweed in the Southfarthing,” says Wood.

It is frankly incredible how easygoing the four actors are. Whatever way you imagine the hobbits to be is precisely what they’re like in real life, quipping as if they’ve just gone down The Green Dragon for a few sneaky pints. 

As the hobbits joke with one another, the 10 years they’ve spent apart seems like an impossibly long time. Wood says it feels incredible to be back together after such a lengthy period, while Monaghan playfully says that he’s disliked by the entire group. 

“Before we came out here, not that it was hard to convince everyone, but I was pretty adamant — I was like, look, we’re gonna be tired, we’re gonna be jet-lagged, we’re gonna be exhausted. We have to go for dinner,” he says. “Even though we’ll probably feel like, ‘No, we just wanna go back to the hotel and crash and sleep’ — I was just saying to ‘Lij, it might be 10 or 12 years until the four of us go for dinner again. Life just moves so quickly.”

As Wood puts it — it just doesn’t feel that long. All four hobbits reveal that they regularly keep in touch via a group chat, which is quite literally named — you guessed it! — “The Hobbits.”

“And so the conversation is constant,” says Astin. “It’s enduring.”

“I sent a nude last night,” adds Boyd. “I was in the bath.”

“I saw it,” says Astin. “I was on the airplane. It came through when I was on the airplane and I went ‘OH JESUS!’ The flight attendant went to pick it up — ‘NO NO!'”

Everyone laughs, and Monaghan teases Astin for being “made of money” for buying WiFi. While I occasionally chime in with a joke of my own, I’m very happy to be a fly on the wall. It isn’t every day you get to see The Lord of the Rings’ iconic hobbits doing hobbit things.

But it’s not just jokes and banter. The reason Astin needed WiFi is because he had to submit a paper for the public administration and public policy course he’s currently taking. “How’s that going?” I ask. 

“It’s f*cking hard,” says Astin. “It’s so hard. I’m actually taking the summer off. My kids say, ‘Dad, you can’t do it anymore, it’s killing you, you’re going grey right in front of our eyes.’ But it’s awesome.”

At this point, it becomes astonishingly easy to see just how close the hobbits are from the direction the conversation drifts. Wood in particular likens their back-and-forth to an especially famous sitcom. The following excerpt has been edited for clarity:

Dominic Monaghan 

Sean sent us a little screengrab of a page he was working on, and I looked at it and was like, ‘I have no f*cking idea.’ Just numbers and decimal points and stuff. I was like, what?

Elijah Wood

I couldn’t make sense of it either.

Sean Astin

No one can, except expert statisticians. There are two numbers at the bottom that laypeople can understand, all the rest of it is gobbledegook. So… tricked you! There’s economics and law, it touches everything. That’s why I like it. 

DM

It’s like Billy, he touches everything. 

Billy will often send quite a few bath pictures because he loves a bath.

Billy Boyd

It’s true.

SA

Anyhow, the nude. 

BB

It was only from the nipples up. 

Me

That’s not too bad.

DM

Yeah, he was in the bath. 

Me

That’s relatively appropriate. 

SA 

It was incredibly suggestive.

DM

Billy will often send quite a few bath pictures because he loves a bath. And it’s usually glasses akimbo, hair all over the place, big smile on his face.

EW

You love a bath.

BB

I do love a bath. 

EW

You’ve always loved a bath.

SA

It was incredibly suggestive.

BB

It’s always been my thing. I love having a bath. 

SA

Since I first met you.

BB

Yeah.

DM

Last time I had a bath I was probably in my teens.

Me

I’m probably the same. 

DM

You’re just… you’re sat in your own filth. You need a shower. You’ve got a lot of dirt to wash off. 

Me

Showers are also faster. 

EW

I’ve come to really like a bath. But I’m the same in the sense that I wouldn’t know what to do with myself in the bath. And I get overheated. 

DM

I get overheated too! So you get sweaty and then you get out of the bath and what, you’re drying the dry sweat on your forehead off and you’re cleaned? No. I could have a shower after a bath. 

EW

This is very much like out of a Seinfeld episode.

I have this sense that the anniversary of the third one is gonna be the one where maybe Peter Jackson will get involved.

Again, everyone laughs, and Astin begins to reminisce on the good old days. He talks about staying up too late, drinking too much, and never wanting to call it a night. The conversation seamlessly transitions to what it was like in New Zealand back in 1999 and 2000. From where I’m sitting, the stream of anecdotes seems never-ending, with every individual memory being recalled in such vivid clarity that you’d be forgiven for thinking the hobbits were discussing something that happened yesterday. 

“The weird thing is that when The Lord of the Rings came out, there was this idea that all of the awards shows, that it was this very lauded thing, but with the Oscars, they saw how somebody said, ‘Oh, well the third one is the one where they’re gonna win everything,'” says Astin. “I think of them as one long movie, but that’s what happened. So in terms of celebrating, and memorialising the anniversary of our experience together, I have this sense that the anniversary of the third one is gonna be the one where maybe Pete[r Jackson] will get involved. But in terms of anecdotes, I mean… endless.”

“It really is endless,” says Wood. “I’ve said this before, but some of my favourite memories are not the kind of imagined flying to the tops of mountains–“

“That’s what I liked,” Astin interjects, eliciting laughter.

“Or hundreds and hundreds of extras on the battlefield,” continues Wood. “All of those things are incredible, [but] it’s all the in-between stuff. It’s like going for a surf on the weekend or meeting for breakfast. A formidable memory is being snowed out of a location and being trucked out of the location lest we get snowed in–

“The Luxor, the Luxor!” shouts Monaghan.

“Oh my f*cking god!” says Wood. “Hilarious. The one driving us was totally inexperienced and was just like, ‘I need to get you back to the HOTEL! Don’t ask me to go anywhere else.'”

“We were laughing at him, which was probably not good at the time,” says Monaghan. 

“No,” Wood concurs. “And then we get back to the hotel and we’re all having whiskey in the laundry room, sitting on laundry machines, getting our [prosthetic] feet taken off.”

“Viggo [Mortensen] was taking photos of us all, and then we had an impromptu snowball fight in the entire town,” says Monaghan. “Remember? Like the entire town centre was a snowball fight.”

“It’s that stuff,” says Wood. “It’s all these little in-between moments that aren’t necessarily related directly to the day of the shoot, but are sort of tangential and a part of the process. That’s the stuff that sticks with me.”

There are, however, moments from being on set that have become powerful memories as well. In fact, some of The Lord of the Rings’ most iconic scenes have stories behind them that are difficult to believe, one of which Monaghan is quick to recall.

“Billy said this thing recently about the scene of second breakfast, where we stop and Aragorn is saying, ‘What’s going on?’ and we have the second breakfast thing,” he says. “I didn’t remember this, but Billy is totally right and jogged my memory. That was an incredibly rushed scene because it started flash-snowing [Wood clarifies that this was in November, so this shouldn’t have happened in the Southern Hemisphere]. And Pete basically came over to us and was like, ‘You’ve got about 45 minutes to an hour to get this and go, otherwise we’re in real trouble with all of our gear.’ And we got what ended up being a real amazing moment in the film, but it was fast.”

“It was meant to be like a half day’s work,” says Wood. “It was so fast.”

Boyd explains that as an actor, that kind of hastiness usually leads to disappointment. Astin, meanwhile, recalls being concerned that maybe not everyone cared about a scene the hobbits were all excited about because it wasn’t strictly necessary for the film.

“But then it becomes a scene that a lot of people talk about,” says Boyd. “And it was honestly done in like, an hour. And then we’re sitting on washing machines drinking whiskey like… what just happened?”

Now that we’re on to discussing specific scenes, I jump at the opportunity to ask Boyd about one of my favourites: his performance of The Edge of Night for Denethor in Minas Tirith. While the lyrics are based on one of Tolkien’s poems, the music was composed by Boyd himself. There’s a reason for that.

“Well, that happened because Howard Shore, who obviously wrote some of the greatest movie music I’ve ever heard for those films — he was gonna do it, and they just asked me to sing it,” Boyd says. “And I was like yeah, I’d love to. And they changed the schedule. We were shooting it in two days and Howard Shore was in New York, and they said, ‘You write music, right? Could you do something?’ So I wrote three little tunes, and I was really into it being Celtic, because I thought of the idea that the Tooks were sort of the Celts. So I did it with a Celtic, old sound as if it was [a song] somebody’s grandfather sang at parties. I went to Pete’s house and I sang the three songs, and we all agreed on that one. We basically shot it the next day. It was kind of weird.”

“Is it not right that the first song you sang, he slapped you across the face?” asks Monaghan.

“Yeah, really hard,” jokes Boyd. “”What’s the next one like?’ That gets you ready.”

Unfortunately, it becomes apparent that my time is quickly running out. “Sorry, man,” says Monaghan. “Sean won’t keep his mouth shut.”

Given that we’ve just discussed The Edge of Night, I decide it’s best to opt for a double-pronged question about how the actors might have personally imprinted on their characters, and whether or not any of them have any similar stories to Viggo Mortensen’s now-illustrious helmet kick — which, you probably know, was completely improvised. Boyd has an incredible story about The Edge of Night, but all of the hobbits have their own fond memories of really getting into the meat of their characters and helping to transform an already extraordinary trilogy into an unprecedented one.

“When we came back for reshoots for Return of the King… this is a moment that Pete was like, ‘Why don’t you just do that?’, and it became something which is only a little moment, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that was great,'” says Monaghan. “I was on set, we were doing something else, it was the end of the third film when the Ring gets destroyed. And Pete just turned to me and was like, ‘Everyone else is reacting in the battle to the towers cracking and falling, and we don’t have anything from you. So we’ll just put the camera on someone’s shoulder and just react like you’re seeing this thing.’ I was like, okay. My hair’s long, I’m full of sweat, there’s blood and all that kind of stuff. And I just kind of like… ‘Yaa!’ and screamed. And Pete’s like, great. What I liked about that moment, even for me watching it, is when I watch that moment, it doesn’t look like me. It’s like I become Merry in that moment. It’s one of the few moments in the film where I’m like, ‘Whoa, I was really deep in there.’ And you always know if you’ve done something right with Pete, because he becomes kind of gleeful. If we, the four of us, nailed it, he’d be like, ‘Hehe, that was great!’ And I remember finishing that and he was like, ‘Hehe, that was great!'”

Perhaps the most surprising part of the interview, however, has to do with Wood and Astin. Their story is rooted in the end of the first film, although fans will likely find it hard to believe.

“There was a moment… so the transitions between the films, where the first one ends and the second one picks up or whatever — I never could keep track,” says Astin. “To me, it’s all one thing. 

“So, we were down at Te Anau on the bottom of the south island, and Elijah and I got a call to come to this coffee shop to meet with Peter and [co-writers] Fran [Walsh] and Philippa [Boyens]. So we’re like, are we in trouble? We don’t get called to the principal’s office — that’s what it felt like. We get there and we’re sitting there and I literally feel like a kid who’s in trouble. I’ve done nothing wrong, but I feel like I’m in trouble. And they come in and they sit down, and they’re so excited. Every day you get additional pages for the script, there’s like thousands of pages. So they came down and they had two pages in their hands, and it was precious to them that they had these two pages, and they handed them to us. It was the end where Frodo is leaving after the breaking of the fellowship, and Sam tries to go with him and is gonna drown. And then Frodo pulls him out and it’s like, ‘I’m coming with you!’ — that moment. They didn’t have that. That heart, they felt it was missing. And I know that it’s us and working with us and how we were that inspired [it]. They figured it out. They cracked the code.”

“It had also been written in reverse,” adds Wood. “Initially, I’m the one who falls and almost drowns, and you pull me out.”

“I remember reading that!” says Monaghan. 

“We shot it,” continues Wood. “Do you not remember that? We shot that. Believe me, I remember because I was in that f*cking water, which was like ice runoff from the mountain, for 45 minutes and I actually turned a shade of blue. It took an hour and a half or two hours to get my body temperature back up again. So we shot that version and then they rewrote it after recognising it was wrong emotionally. And they flipped it, and that’s the meaning you’re talking about.”

“I mean, you talk about improvisation, like [Viggo] kicking the helmet or whatever,” says Astin. “It’s improvisation on that level, as a writer, as a storyteller…”

“Reacting to the environment, the people,” Wood continues, as the hobbits begin to finish each other’s sentences. “They were doing that all the time.”

“We were all expected to do that,” says Monaghan. “Like Sean said, in terms of additional pages on set, I would say it was uncommon to not have new pages.”

“‘The printer broke’ is the only reason there aren’t 30 new pages,” jokes Astin. 

“It can be a thing oftentimes in a movie where there are that many rewrites, it can sort of feel like a sign that something is amiss,” says Wood. “That wasn’t the case with this. It was just constant refinement. [We were] always trying to make it better, to make it more human, and connected, and emotional, which always felt to be the primary reasons for any refinement. It was like, how do we make this more connective? How do we make this more emotional and truthful to the book?”

“You also have to remember it was 1999 and 2000, so if they changed a couple of words or a prop, that had to be disseminated to 150 people,” says Astin. “E-mail wasn’t like it is now. There was no texting like it is now. So that was the analog way of making sure the conductors were keeping people in the same space, even with just minor little adjustments that would get made. At a certain point, I felt that I stopped reading them, but you’re like, I’ll know what to do when I’m standing there and I look at my clothes, and if I’m really dirty we’re probably near Mordor.”

“For you and I in particular it got a little confusing, because there’s a big section of Frodo and Sam’s journey that’s against a similar background,” says Wood. “We were just [going] from one rock set to another, and we were like — where are we? I don’t know anymore.”

It feels fitting in a bittersweet kind of way that this is where time runs out — the hobbits are due on stage in 30 minutes and have yet to eat second breakfast. But our conversation ends where Frodo and Sam’s journey begins, during the now iconic scene at Amon Hen that has been eliciting happy tears from millions of people all over the world for almost 20 years. 

In that same time, the hobbits have remained as close as ever. Even after a decade apart, the bonds between friends as fast as these are unbreakable, to the extent that seeing them together makes you believe that even after going to the Undying Lands, their connection will never fade away. It’s been over a decade since they were in the same room, and after this tour, it might be another decade before they are again — but as any real fan of The Lord of the Rings will tell you, the Fellowship of the Ring can never truly be broken.

If you want to catch the hobbits reunion panel for yourself, they have posted dates for Orlando, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and Toronto through this summer. If you’re even remotely interested in fantasy cinema’s greatest epic, it’s an absolutely unmissable event.

For even more reminiscing about the making of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, check out our interview with Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd from last year.