“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” author J.R.R. Tolkien once said. Some big-shot movie producers once tried to change the course of The Lord of the Rings with a ridiculous suggestion. But like Frodo taking the One Ring to Mount Doom, their idea was (figuratively) cast into the fire.
While discussing their The Friendship Onion podcast with IGN, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, who played Merry and Pippin in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, revealed that director Peter Jackson faced “pressure from above” to kill one of the four main Hobbits.
It didn’t happen, thankfully, but Monaghan thinks he knows who it would have been.
“It’s a good job that didn’t happen, because it would have been me,” he said. “It definitely would have. There’s no way they are killing Frodo and Sam, and the only ones that would be left would be Merry and Pippin. They wouldn’t kill Pippin because Pippin has a really strong story with Gandalf. It would have definitely been me. I think Pete quite rightly was like, ‘This is a luminary piece of written work, and we need to stick close to the text.’ So, he stuck by his guns. Yeah, I’m thankful that didn’t happen.”
Monaghan already has one iconic pop culture death. He didn’t need another.
(Via IGN)