SMTV presenters: C = Cat, D = Dane, L = Louise

C: The cast of Lord Of The Rings are with us this morning. Now before we go on we must just say happy birthday to Dominic, it’s Dominic’s birthday today!

(cheers)

Dom: 25, 25 today…

C: Are you 25 today?

Dom: 25 today, yeah.

C: Don’t look a day over 40.

Dom: Thank you.

(laughter)

C: Now we’ve got another clip to see so lets look at that before we dive into the emails.

Plays LOTR clip – Boromir struggling with the ring on the mountain

(applause)

Dom: Oooh.

C: He (Sean Bean) kind of struggles doesn’t he.

Dom: He’s a kind of good baddie, bad goodie…

C: And he was supposed to be here today.

Dom: He was, but he’s got the kind of… ooh…

All 4 groan, look at the floor and put their little fingers to their lips, then point downwards.

Dom: Sean, if you’re out there, we’ve got a few corks we’re gonna bring back for you.

Elijah: Yeah, mate.

(laughter)

C: Listen, we’ve got a few emails for you, the first ones to Elijah.

Elijah: Uh oh…

C: It’s from Claire Stewart in Peterborough, she says what were you favourite moments making the FOTR?

Elijah: Probably spending time with these guys! Anything with the hobbits was absolutely brilliant, and we just became the best of mates, so any time that we filmed together was brilliant.

C: Aww, togetherness, that’s what we like.

Sean: It was hard going up the mountain in the helicopter.

Elijah: That’s true!

C: Did you go up mountains in helicopters?

Sean: Yeah, every morning for months, we’d hear them coming…

D: Did you get to fly one?

Elijah: Oh wouldn’t that have been nice!

Billy: (pointing to Dom) He flew an aero plane!

Elijah: Oh that’s right!

C: Why?!

(laughter)

Dom: Well I was going to a separate set, and the pilot was really cool, we were in a 2-seater jet, and we got up to altitude, and he just said on you go, and I flew it for about an hour.

C: Check out James Bond over there!

D: Now I’ve got one here from Tanya James from Stoke-On-Trent, it’s to Sean, or any of the cast, not picky; is it true you borrowed soldiers from New Zealand army to film the fight scenes?

Sean: Yeah, it’s true. The New Zealand army was made available at a certain point, and they all dressed up (as) Rohan soldiers.

D: Not a lot of wars going on in New Zealand then! Lots of time off.

Billy: They take it really seriously, so at one point we were leading them into battle… and we’re not the tallest of people, and there were these huge New Zealand army behind us… wa-hay!!

C: Did it feel good though? Was it like: “now you mess with me”!

(laughter)

Elijah: Remember that location with the mines, the mines… We weren’t supposed to walk around because there were mines, and they didn’t know where they were, so we were kept to a certain area… and, yeah, they could have gone off.

L: I’ve got a quick one from Jemima Hill, it’s for Dominic. Did you need much training for your part, and did you have to learn new languages?

Dom: The whole fellowship went over about 6 weeks before the filming, just to kind of get together this fellowship thing, and also every day we would go to the gym, we would do horse riding, sword fighting, we would learn to ride canoes, dialect training…

L: Like an adventure holiday!

Dom: Yeah, so I think what they wanted to do was try and have a group thing to bring us together, so by the time we started filming we were already really good mates.

Elijah: We were hobbits by that point as well…

C: Great stuff. (to Elijah) And is it true you have the actual ring?

Elijah: I do, I have it… (does REALLY freaky Gollum impression) It’s mine!! My precious!!…

(laughter)

C: Well thank you very much for joining us this morning, it’s the cast of LOTR!

(applause)

Huge thank you to Mim for the transcript.