The Oscar winner, Adrian Brody, admitted he didn’t quite get what he was being offered, and by the time he figured it out, it was already lighting up box offices and changing fantasy cinema forever.
Brody spilled the regret in a throwback chat with GQ (via The Hollywood Reporter), saying producers approached him for the Peter Jackson epic, but he just wasn’t feeling it. “I, somehow, didn’t grasp it,” he said. “I don’t know what part I would have been right for, but it was some Hobbit-like character. I was looking for something else.”
Translation: he wasn’t chasing hairy feet and wizard quests back then.
But his “what was I thinking?” moment hit hard later. He remembered in the same interview sitting in the theater with his then-girlfriend, watching the film that became a cultural phenomenon. “She turned to me and said, ‘You passed on Lord of the Rings?!’ I remember feeling so stupid.”
And the sting didn’t stop there. While he couldn’t say for sure what character he was up for, the film was jam-packed with future franchise icons – from Frodo to Faramir. But at the time, the scale of the project didn’t click for him. Brody admitted he was searching for something “different,” though in hindsight, Middle-earth would’ve been a pretty solid career move.
It wasn’t the first time Brody made headlines for a bold decision, though. Back in 2003, he infamously kissed Halle Berry on stage while accepting his Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist. The moment, which he once defended by saying to Indiewire, “There was a lot of love in that room, real love and recognition,” aged poorly in the post-Weinstein era.
Tack that onto his Saturday Night Live ban for bizarre behavior, and the man had a few public missteps in the early 2000s.
But unlike the Berry kiss, which he didn’t regret, Lord of the Rings clearly lingered. Still, all wasn’t lost with Peter Jackson. The director circled back and cast Brody in King Kong (2005) as Jack Driscoll. And that one, Brody embraced fully.
He described the King Kong premiere in Times Square as “a big deal.”
True. That kind of fast-food fame rarely comes around twice.
So while Brody never journeyed to Mordor, he did get a blockbuster redemption arc, and one wild ride on Skull Island. Still, missing out on The Lord of the Rings? He knew it was a miss. A huge one. And to this day, he’s still kicking himself for it.
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