Peter Jackson Revealed The Chaotic Origins Of The Best 'Lord Of The Rings' Meme

Despite all the Hollywood celebrity house tours being canceled, you can still get your fix of staring at some actor's walls by tuning into Reunited Apart. It's a YouTube side hustle of actor Josh Gad (soon to be bought by CBS for a billion dollars) where he teleconferences with the cast and creators of iconic movies. And yesterday's fellowship of the Zoom was the gang of The Lord of the Rings, who just love to dish about what an absolute son of an orc it was making the most ambitious movie franchise of its time.

Each cast member had their own chainmail clad war stories, like how a confused Ian McKellen had to shoot both his arrival to and farewell from The Shire, that bookend the trilogy, in a matter of hours on his first day -- which, given that he's an eternal demigod who's been alive for millennia must've been how short that whole saga felt to Gandalf. But none suffered more (except for Viggo Mortensen's foot) from the hectic schedule than Sean Bean, who was teased by Jackson and rest of the cast by for being so terrified of having to be helicoptered all around the New Zealand wilderness that he once hiked up a mountain in full Boromir gear so as not to be at the mercy of some flying beast. But Jackson then revealed that Bean's most stressful scene was also his most famous one: giving the "One does not simply walk into Mordor" speech, an acting tour de force that etched itself into the annals of film history and internet lol-ery. Let's rewatch it in its non-meme form:

During the reunion, Jackson offered a peek behind the scenes of that famed speech that, in turn, explained another peek -- the one Boromir has at his groin at the start. As it turns out, that brow-rubbing downward glance wasn't just an acting choice by Bean. Instead, he's peeking at a piece of the script he taped to his knee because Jackson and his co-writer Philippa Boyens had only finished rewriting the speech the night before, forcing Bean to cheat off a crib sheet like he's trying not to flunk AP Literature.

Of course, as a billion memes have shown, Bean still delivers a memorable performance despite having had no time to memorize it. On the other hand, perhaps all that chaos gave him the opportunity for some great method acting, conveying the weary frustration of Boromir, who has no time for some hoity-toity elf telling him he has to stroll into Orcland with a bunch of children and a ring-shaped atom bomb, by using his own frustration of having some hoity-toity director telling him he has zero time to learn a career-defining monolog.

For more weird tangents he cribs from a page taped to his knee, do follow Cedric on Twitter.

Top Image: New Line Cinema