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Fri 31 October 2025 16:05, UK
It’s been a dozen years since Peter Jackson directed a movie, and it’s been even longer since he directed a good one, but since he’s the guy who helmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he’ll always carry a certain amount of cache in Hollywood.
His only theatrical credits since The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies was released in 2013 are as the co-writer and producer of Mortal Engines, one of the biggest box office bombs in cinema history, and producing The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which also tanked and largely only existed so that Warner Bros. could hold onto the rights to JRR Tolkien’s expansive fantasy world.
However, since he’s a three-time Academy Award winner who filmed the unfilmable and delivered one of the greatest and most impressive trilogies that’s ever been made, he’s still a big deal, regardless of how much he’s scaled back his directorial output. The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King hold up as well as ever, but they were nothing short of a nightmare to cast.
Viggo Mortensen was only hired after shooting had started when Stuart Townsend got the boot, with Nicolas Cage and Russell Crowe having already knocked back Aragorn, Sean Connery turned down the role of Gandalf, Uma Thurman regretted passing on Eowyn, Ethan Hawke pulled out of playing Faramir, and Lucy Lawless completely forgot to turn up to her audition as Galadriel.
Beyond that, there were two names initially under consideration that Jackson was told he wasn’t allowed to cast under any circumstances, and it wasn’t until years later that he found out the troubling reasons why. When The Lord of the Rings was compiling its early wish-lists, Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd were both present and accounted for.
“I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with, and we should avoid them at all costs. This was probably in 1998,” Jackson told Stuff. “At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us, but, in hindsight, I realise that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing.”
Sorvino had recently won an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in Mighty Aphrodite, and Judd was a rising star who’d appeared in Michael Mann’s Heat, Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill, and starred opposite Morgan Freeman in Kiss the Girls. All it takes are two words to explain why Jackson was instructed to keep them as far away from The Lord of the Rings as possible: Harvey Weinstein.
Judd revealed in 2015 that she’d been sexually harassed by an industry mogul, and two years later, she confirmed that Weinstein was responsible, the same month Sorvino went public with her own experience of dealing with the disgraced producer, with Jackson having no idea that his grotesque behaviour was the reason why he’d been told that they needed to be removed from consideration.
“I now suspect we were fed false information about both of these talented women,” he confessed. “And as a direct result, their names were removed from our casting list.”
Weinstein tried to sabotage several careers out of twisted spite without ever informing the filmmakers, who would have happily cast them, why they ‘weren’t the right fit’ for the project.
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