Every single person who has ever watched a movie knows the bit about Viggo Mortensen hurting his toe while shooting The Two Towers. The fact that Mortensen broke two toes when he kicked a helmet has become stuff of movie legend, or at least obnoxious boyfriend factoids, alongside Ridley Scott not warning the Alien cast about the chest burster or the storm trooper bonking his head in Star Wars.
But now, another accident story has emerged to further enrich the legend of Viggo in Lord of the Rings. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Peter Jackson revealed how a surfing accident involving Mortensen forced him to change the way he shot the film.
When Jackson gathered the actors to film the Mines of Moria sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring, Mortensen “comes in, and he’s got his eye is bulged out, black eye, shut, like a boxer swollen.” Turns out, Jackson learned, that “Viggo had been out with the Hobbits during the weekend, and he’d been surfing, and he had sustained an injury surfing, like the board had flipped in the air and whacked him in the face,” and so “all I could do is to shoot him from the side. I couldn’t shoot [head on].”
Frustrating as it surely was for Jackson in the moment, his ingenuity in handling the scene is part of the legend of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In addition to crafting a faithful but user-friendly adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s dense, idiosyncratic works, Jackson earned praise for in-camera effects that brought Middle Earth to life. Tricks such as forced perspective to make Ian McKellen as Gandalf tower of the Hobbits helped move DVD copies of the film, filled with behind-the-scenes footage that showed how it was done.
