For years there’s been chatter that the recently-deceased David Bowie was up for a major role in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, likely as elf king Elrond, but we’ve had very little in the way of confirmation. I mean, Bowie as an imperious magical monarch certainly makes sense, he already killed it as the Goblin King in Labyrinth after all, but is it really true?
It is, according to Dominic Monaghan, who played Merry in the Lord of the Rings movies. Apparently Monaghan’s audition for the movies included a chance run in with the Thin White Duke himself…
“I was doing an audition for Lord of the Rings, and when it ended I went over and talked to John Hubbard, who was running the audition, and he said, ‘Hey, it went really well. You should wait around for 5 or 10 mins. We’ll give you some feedback. I thought, ‘Oh, OK, cool, and I sat in the reception office. As I was reading a magazine waiting, David Bowie came in and signed his little list and went in. And I’m assuming he read for Gandalf. I can’t think of anything else he would’ve read for. He may have read for something else, but I’m a huge David Bowie fan, so just seeing him in person was pretty special to me.”
It sounds like Monaghan was just speculating, but dang, David Bowie as Gandalf would have made for a very different, arguably more interesting, set of movies. Word is Jackson didn’t cast Bowie because he thought he’d be distracting, a very reasonable concern, but still, it’s too bad Bowie didn’t get to be a hobbit’s hero, even just for one day.
(via Huffington Post)
