Lord of the Rings Facts

Sean Connery turned down the role of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings because he didn't understand the script.

The entire cast of 'The Lord of the Rings' got matching tattoos after filming. The nine actors who played the Fellowship got the Elvish word for 'nine' inked on them, a pact made by Viggo Mortensen.

Before he played Dracula, Saruman, and Count Dooku, Christopher Lee served as an RAF intelligence officer attached to Britain's Special Operations Executive - and spent the final months of the war hunting Nazi war criminals. He was fluent in five languages, sworn to secrecy for life, and once corrected Peter Jackson on how a stabbing actually sounds. The man who played 200 villains had hunted real ones.

Elijah Wood, Frodo himself, has spent more than a decade as a working DJ. He and his friend Zach Cowie play all-vinyl sets in small clubs, bringing crates of records from their own collections and never a laptop. At one sold-out show the crowd turned up in cloaks and pointed ears, and Wood opened with "We have no plan." They are still playing out of those crates.