“Most people want to go to Middle Earth,” says Billy Boyd, the actor who portrayed the hobbit Pippin in the Lord of the Rings film franchise. Boyd thinks that’s why fans attend events like the 2018 Wizard World Comic Con Columbus, where Boyd will be a featured guest, taking place this year from Friday, June 8 to Sunday, June 10.
Boyd has had years to reflect on the films’ popularity and the immense fan reaction.
“It’s not so much the actual films,” Boyd says, “it’s the world that Tolkien created: Hobbiton, Rivendell, and these beautiful places that he dreamt up and invented. But because you can’t be there, the closest people can get to being there is the actors from the films. So, when [fans] try to articulate that, they ask ‘What was it like to be in those movies?’ And because [the films were shot] over four years, that’s too big a question to be able to answer. That’s what I’ve found over the years — people just want to know what Middle Earth was like.”
Boyd’s background helped him fit into the magical landscape of the films in surprising ways, most notably because he found that his native Scotland was unexpectedly similar to New Zealand, where the films were shot, even down to the plant life.
“A lot of Scots went to New Zealand during the Highland Clearances and accidentally brought with them plants,” Boyd says. “So you’ll be driving in the south island and you’re like ‘That’s heather! There’s heather over there.’”
But, don’t expect to travel to New Zealand and visit everywhere the films were shot.
“We went to places where you weren’t actually allowed to go: they were environmentally protected, the tops of some mountains,” says Boyd. “We would go up there with a very small crew, maybe just a cameraman, a makeup person, Pete Jackson, and the actors. Sometimes it felt like we were in the Fellowship. We’d be having lunch up there, and all I could see was beautiful landscapes at the top of this mountain, and there’s Aragorn sitting on a rock having a sandwich, Frodo and Sam chatting. It felt real.”
The final similarity that Boyd has with the films? A hearty, hobbit-like appetite, mixed with stereotypical Scottish frugality, as he ended our talk asking about good places to eat in Columbus.
“I want really good breakfast places and I’m incredibly tight, so really cheap,” he says.
You can assist Pippin in finding inexpensive places to eat in Columbus by visiting crafttheshow.com for his Twitter handle and our full interview.
