The Lord of the Rings originally wanted Sean Connery to play Gandalf

Twenty years ago, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring debuted in theaters, setting off a love for big budget fantasy that’s still going strong today. The movies were certainly the most memorable experience I’d ever had in the theater at the time, and on their anniversary everyone is coming out to celebrate them. For instance, The Fellowship of the Rings was just added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, and to see the cast members rap with Killer Mike on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert?

But everything could have gone very differently. We all know and love The Lord of the Rings cast now — Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn — but neither of them were director Peter Jackson’s first choices to play those roles. “They only wanted me because the established stars said no,” McKellen recently told The Guardian. “They wanted Tony Hopkins and Sean Connery.”

Producer Mark Ordesky thinks McKellen is exaggerating a bit. “We desperately wanted him.” But he does admit that they made an offer to Connery. “We never got an answer until years later, but apparently he read the material and just didn’t get it.”

I am trying to picture Sean Connery screaming “You shall not pass” in his Scottish brogue and honestly kind of enjoying what I see. McKellen forever though.

Viggo Mortensen felt “awkward” replacing Stuart Townsend as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings

As for Aragorn, Jackson even hired another actor entirely before replacing him with Viggo Mortensen: originally, the part was going to be played by Queen of the Damned star Stuart Townsend.

“I understood from the filmmakers that Stuart Townsend — who is a great actor, and was really perfect for the part — was too young, because he was the same age as the actors playing the Hobbits,” Mortensen explained to Yahoo Entertainment. “They just needed someone who was a little bit older. It was just a bad luck situation.”

For reference, Townsend was 27 at the time, and Mortensen 41. There were no hard feelings, though. “I did run into Stuart briefly on the street and said hello,” Mortensen recalled. “He seemed like a very nice guy, and he’s obviously a very fine actor. It’s just one of those things that happens in our business, you know?”

Still, even if everyone understood what was happening, it’s still nerve-racking to replace someone when production was already underway. “I felt unprepared,” Mortensen recalled. “The other actors had been there for weeks and months in some cases preparing for the arduous task of shooting the whole trilogy. I also felt awkward, because I’d never been in a position of replacing another actor.”

"The first thing I did when I landed was learn how to do the sword fighting required. It was nice to do something physical first. And then the second thing I did was sitting in the corner of the pub in Bree smoking the pipe in the shadows. So those were both physical things that established the way the character moves and [his] physical presence. I was grateful that I wasn’t thrown right into a dialogue scene!"

I’d say it worked out!

Next year, Amazon will try to revive Lord of the Rings fever with a new TV series set during the Second Age of Middle-earth. And that’s just one of the many high fantasy shows coming out in 2022:

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