Lord of the Rings: This actor went through makeup hell

If Peter Jackson’s trilogy, adapted from the works of JRR Tolkien, twice won the Oscar for best makeup (in 2002 and 2004), it is no accident. Indeed, to create the hairy legs of the hobbits, the pointed ears of the elves or the terrifying faces of the orcs, the film crew had to compete with persistence and ingenuity.

An effort that was definitely shared by some of the actors in the trilogy, who are sometimes forced to spend very long hours in the make-up room for the same scene.

Indeed, as we learn in the audio commentary for The Fellowship of the Ring, actor Lawrence Macquarie, completely unrecognizable behind the monstrous face of Uruk Lurtz, had to exercise admirable patience before he could answer Christopher Lee. A short sequence of his face-to-face meeting with the wizard Saruman.

“Does anyone know how long it took him to become Lurtz?”asks Billy Boyd, Pippin’s interpreter, in the audio commentary. “He arrived at 11:00 p.m. or midnight and we were waiting at 7:00 a.m. They were fixing it all night. He couldn’t go to the bathroom.”

Lawrence Macquarie experienced a real ordeal, but one that the latter – no doubt honored to be involved in an adventure of this magnitude – seems to have lived very well, as Christopher Lee recounts in the commentary:

“I was bad for him”Saruman’s Interpreter recalls. “9 hours of makeup. Everything had to be glued to it. It wasn’t the costume. The costume doesn’t move enough. It’s too stiff. But everything was glued. It took 9 hours for a very short scene where he was. He was standing behind me. He was excited about it all. I don’t know , how did he do it. He wasn’t the only one. Others went through hell.”

(Re)discover the hidden details of ‘Fellowship of the Ring’…