Billy Boyd, who played the Hobbit Pippin in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has revealed a scrapped scene between him and Dominic Monaghan's Merry that would have seen the characters lose their clothes.
"There was almost nudity in the movies," Boyd told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. "Me and Dom... [Writer] Philippa Boyens… she did a gag, and she wrote a scene, because we'd been kind of doing some gags and winding people up, having a bit of fun, and she wrote a scene, that she said, 'Oh, it's a new scene we're filming next week, with the Ents, with Treebeard. So when Merry and Pippin are up Treebeard, he gets a fright and shakes his branches, which makes you guys fall' – and this has all been printed on this script – 'it makes you guys fall, and as you hit all the branches on the way down, by the time you hit the ground, you're naked. And Merry turns to Pippin and says, 'It's cold, isn't it?' And Pippin says, 'Hold me, Merry.'"
Boyd continued: "I call up Dom and I said, 'Have you seen this new scene?' And he's like, 'Yeah, yeah I kind of read it.' I was like, 'We're naked!'"
As for Monaghan's thoughts on the scene, he commented: "I was kind of into it. I have a really fantastic arse, and I thought now's the time to get it out."
Though it seems the scene was just a joke and wasn't intended to be filmed, it would probably have taken place in The Two Towers, which saw Pippin and Merry spend a lot of time with Treebeard and his fellow Ents.
While The Lord of the Rings trilogy – and its sequels/prequels The Hobbit trilogy – have concluded, Amazon are moving ahead with their own big budget Lord of the Rings TV show. Amazon Studios CEO Jennifer Salke recently talked about the budget, which is reportedly an eye-watering $465 million. "This is a full season of a huge world-building show," she said. "The number is a sexy headline or a crazy headline that's fun to click on, but that is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series."
The series doesn't yet have a release date, though we can probably expect it in 2022. Meanwhile, Boyd and Monaghan have launched their own podcast about their time filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy to tide you over.
