CHAPTER FIFTEEN

You think it’s easy to wrestle with a giant spider?

Trust me, it’s not. One of the most exciting scenes in The Return of the King is Sam’s battle with Shelob, the massive arachnid who guards Mordor and at one point captures and nearly kills Frodo. It’s a thrilling and artful sequence, one that allows Sam’s courage to percolate to the surface and effectively stamps him as the hero of the third film. He is an ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance, and he rises to the occasion in epic fashion, as so many of the great literary and cinematic heroes have done. That the scene works as well as it does is testament to Peter Jackson’s vision and talent. When film critics repeatedly pointed out that Shelob was the most realistic and frightening giant spider ever depicted on film, it wasn’t faint praise. A creation such as Shelob, in the wrong hands, might well have resulted in a messy, laughably implausible climax to a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve. In other words, if not done properly, it might have been a disaster.

My job, as I saw it, was to not screw it up. Seriously. Shelob was so good, and the action sequence so well constructed, that I had only to make sure that I followed the choreography and emoted properly and energetically. But it proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Throughout filming I’d been reasonably adept at playing make-believe, at visualizing the story’s numerous computer-generated creatures; my imagination was good, and I could act opposite my imagination with relative ease. People would sometimes ask me, “Isn’t it hard to look at a piece of tape or a tennis ball and envision the thing it represents?” Well, no, not when you have Alan Lee’s and John Howe’s illustrations as models. They helped seed my imagination.

Something happened with Shelob, though. The sequence took a great deal of time to film, and at one point, when the camera was supposed to cut to me, and I was supposed to deliver the strongest line of the scene—“Let him go, you filth!”—I had a moment of crisis. Suddenly, for some reason I still can’t explain, I couldn’t see the spider anymore. Shelob had disappeared. It was as if my imagination had dried up.

“What’s wrong?” asked Peter, who directed the scene.

“I don’t know. I can’t see the spider.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean … it’s gone. Shit!”

I started panicking, having an internal meltdown, which is kind of funny when you think about it. I’d held it together through all the bad moments, through all the dull and frustrating times when I wanted only a chance to show what I could do, and now, here I was, starring in the climactic action sequence of the whole trilogy—in a scene that was supposed to have the audience rising out of their seats and pumping their fists—melting into a puddle of anxiety.

The truth is, we had actually filmed the Shelob action sequence during principal photography, and most of it was handled by John Mahaffey. I had fought and killed Shelob years before. Now, during the pickup shooting for The Return of the King, I had lived with Sam for four years. I had seen the first two movies countless times and traveled around the world promoting the movies. Thousands of people had told me what they thought about my performance, and I’d read innumerable articles about every aspect of the films. In a sense, I had all of that wisdom and experience at my disposal when Peter brought me back to New Zealand to shoot, among other things, this climactic moment. I think I’d even seen a rough version of the sequences immediately preceding and following the Shelob cave stuff.

If you think about George Custer and Ulysses S. Grant, and what they knew and when they knew it, you can begin to appreciate my wee dilemma. I just couldn’t quite drop into this moment—or it didn’t feel “Sam-like.” I loved the cinematic heroism of it, and I certainly had wanted for years to get this kind of opportunity on screen. But I’d already gotten to do the boat scene with Elijah and the unfathomably special scene in the ruins of Osgilith with Frodo, where we talk about the great stories that really matter, and the fact that there is still good in the world worth fighting for. So, could I get a grip and do the relatively simple “hero shot”?

For a few long seconds, I really didn’t know.

After a brief respite, a drink of water, a few words of encouragement, and a pat on the back, we tried again. And again. And again. Ultimately, I got it right, but it was hard. It took a lot of push-ups and screaming and emotional calisthenics. I did that a lot. I’d do arm curls, jumping jacks, anything to get the blood flowing, to trigger my throat and face before going in front of the camera. There’s something about screaming that actually wakes you up and gets you ready for an action sequence. I developed a bit of a reputation among the other actors. They’d say, “Oh great, there goes Sean, warming up again.” Elijah ended up mildly embracing this technique, too, and not just to ridicule me. Action sequences are not as elemental as they might seem. Think about it. You sit around for seven hours and then they call you, and you have to walk in and get all excited and start screaming at the top of your lungs. How do you go from being exhausted to doing that? You run around the block, or you do sit-ups or push-ups. You do whatever works. At least I did. My preparatory histrionics became such a source of amusement that someone put together a gag reel of me barking, jumping up and down, screaming like a madman. It was a howl, I have to admit. The Brits would watch me and say, “Excuse me, mate, are you going to be doing that all day? Because it’s a bit, well, you know, distracting.”

Even more difficult though, are the moments of quiet emotion, for there is an honesty and a rawness to those scenes that require more than just playing. You open your soul when you do work like that—or at least you should. There is a scene near the end of The Return of the King in which Sam cradles a weary and wounded Frodo on the side of a volcano, and tries to comfort him with a sweet and simple speech about the land they have left behind and all that it represents. In Sam’s tearful words is a tribute to the simple things in life, the things worth fighting for, as well as a recognition of the likelihood that they may not survive their journey: Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon and the orchards will be in blossom, and the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields. And eating the first of the strawberries with cream … Do you remember the taste of strawberries?

That scene was the single greatest acting experience of my life, and I’ll never forget it. But getting there—getting to the point where I was capable of such work, of meeting the standard set by my director, my fellow performers, and the script of a lifetime—was a long process. Roughly twenty-five years.

Here’s what I mean. There are four specific scenes in my career that I consider to be the equivalent of a complete educational experience—grade school, high school, college, graduate school—in terms of emotional maturity on screen. The first was in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom, when I was eight years old and received a spontaneous acting lesson from my mother. She had asked me if I wanted to be in the movie, and I thought it sounded like fun, even though I’d be playing her abused son. The role wasn’t simply handed to me—I had to audition. So I worked on the scenes with my mother at home, and then we taped the audition on the set of the television show One Day at a Time. I don’t remember feeling stressed or nervous, just comfortable doing the work with my mother. And I got the part.

The challenge came on the day we were supposed to film the most disturbing and emotionally charged scene in the movie: a scene in which the mother attacks her son in the family kitchen. We went at it according to the script. Mom grabbed me and threw me around and started banging my head against the counter, all the while screaming at the top of her lungs. Acting her little heart out. Instead of wailing like a frightened, wounded animal, as the script suggested, I covered my face and started to giggle uncontrollably. It was nervous laughter really, for I couldn’t help but think, Whoa, this is a little too close to home. I’ve known some of these moments. We did a few takes, but each time I’d break out laughing, and the director would yell, “Cut,” and my mother would walk away, seething. Finally, she pulled me aside, crouched low, and put her face right next to mine.

“Look,” she said, and I could tell by her tone that I was in trouble. “I took a chance on you. What do you think you’re doing? This is my career; this is my life.” She paused, looked back at the cast and crew. “These people are counting on me. They’re counting on you!”

With that, I burst into tears.

As soon as I started crying, my mother turned to the director, made a circular motion with her hand, and whispered something that sounded a lot like, “Keep it rolling.” And that’s what they did. Within seconds my movie mother was beating me about the head and face all over again, shouting her lines, and I was sobbing like a baby. Eventually the scene came to an end, the director yelled, “Cut! Print! That was brilliant!” and my mother wrapped her arms around me, gave me a big kiss on the cheek, messed up my hair, and said, “Now that’s acting!”

“Yeah?” I sniffed.

“Yes.”

Proud and relieved, and maybe just a bit confused, I said, “Uhhhh, okay.”

That was my first drama lesson.

The second lesson came a few years later, in a miniseries called The Rules of Marriage, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Elliott Gould, and directed by a man named Milton Catsalas, who later went on to become a world-renowned acting instructor in Beverly Hills. This, for me, was another case of art imitating life, for the movie centered on a couple in the midst of an eroding marriage. My parents were in the process of getting a divorce, just like the couple in the movie. I played their son. The audition included a scene in which the father sits with the boy in the front yard of their lovely home and tells him that he’s going to be leaving. Milton played the part of the father in the audition, and when the script called for me to hug him and cry, I did precisely that. I mean, I wasn’t really crying, but the feeling I experienced as we embraced was real enough, and he loved it. He noted it, congratulated me on the work, and I got the job.

When we shot the scene, however, something went very wrong. Elliott Gould, whom I liked and admired, and with whom I established a strong rapport, had some type of problem on the day we filmed that particular scene. I remember it was late in the day, and Elliott was beating himself up because he was having an extremely difficult time working up the requisite emotion. It’s a strange and awkward thing when this happens. The director always prefers that an actor summon whatever it is that’s required to produce a real emotional moment, to open the tear ducts in a manner that is plausible and effective. In other words, don’t fake it.

Elliott was giving it his best shot, but nothing seemed to work for him, and with each passing take the anxiety and tension mounted. There were discussions about whether they should resort to using artificial tears, but Elliott balked at that notion. Meanwhile, Milton kept looking at me, the ten-year-old kid on the side, in much the same way that a baseball coach might look at a pitcher in his bullpen. I was the ace reliever, the guy Milton could insert into the lineup if he needed someone to capture the emotion of the scene. But I could feel that pressure, and when we shot the scene, I was just honest and reacted the way I had in the audition with Milton. Or so I thought. It didn’t come across that way on camera. Milton had been more committed to me in the audition than Elliott was during the actual filming of the movie, simply because he was thoroughly consumed by his own anxiety over how he was coming across in front of the camera. There was no give-and-take, no partnership, no sharing of the emotional burden. It was almost as if each of us was performing a monologue, which was exactly the opposite of the scene’s intent.

We shot the scene a couple of times, but it never really worked the way it should have, which exasperated Milton.

“What’s wrong?” he asked me. “Why isn’t it like it was the last time, in the audition?”

I had no answer, of course. I was only ten years old and following the lead of the adults. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew it wasn’t my fault, and that awareness caused me to lose respect in that moment for both Milton and Elliott. Over the years, as I matured and learned more about acting, my memory of the incident only intensified; how unfair, I thought, to expect a child to carry the full emotional weight of a scene when he’s working alongside a seasoned professional who is having a bad day. Later, I audited Milton’s class and reminded him of that incident. I told him how I felt, and he apologized. He didn’t realize I had experienced the incident in that way, and he felt bad about it. I was impressed that he was so open to hearing me talk about something that had happened so long ago, and it was important for me to share the memory of that experience, because it really did screw me up for a while; whenever I had a crying scene in a movie, I had tremendous difficulty summoning the requisite emotion to make the scene work.5

Crying in front of the camera is an interesting act, one that is often devoid of any real emotion. Most actors have ways of faking it and getting by. They can pinch a tear or two and project emotion that seems to match the quality of the scene, or they can rely on chemical help, a dash of instant tears. Really, though, it’s extraordinarily rare that someone is talented enough and emotive enough to cry authentically on cue, in the moment, take after take after take. When it happens, it’s no accident; it’s usually a marriage of a great performer and the best moment in a great script. Here’s the truth: a lot of the time, actors have a hard time crying because the scenes in which they are asked to cry really aren’t that good. The writing doesn’t facilitate the muse. It’s a remarkable thing when you see an actor who is so emotionally available that he can be sitting off camera, eating a burger, waiting for his call, and then moments later, when the director says, “Start crying, please,” he does it. I’ve seen this, and I’ve often wondered, How can anyone do that? Because I just don’t get it. But when it happens naturally, when the drama of the scene lends itself to real emotion—that I understand.

My third acting lesson—college, so to speak—occurred when I was playing a college student: Rudy Reuttiger. Rudy is a movie that wants to make its audience cry, which can be a dangerous thing. Done properly, emotional movies stir something in the viewers and pull them into the experience. Done badly, they become unintentional jokes and black marks on the résumés of everyone involved. Rudy, I think, was exceptionally well done. The writer took great care to be faithful to the character’s legitimately inspirational story, while refusing to fall prey to the pitfalls of overt sentimentality. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Angelo Pizzo wrote a great script. My job was to inject honesty and believability into this blue-collar character, to make him a three-dimensional human being, and not just a sports-movie cliché.

A pivotal scene in the movie, and the most challenging for me as an actor, is one that depicts Rudy’s acceptance to Notre Dame, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It’s a powerful scene, one that begins quietly, with Rudy reading the acceptance letter while sitting on a bench. The director, David Anspaugh, designed the scene beautifully, with a crane shot that pans from humble Holy Cross Junior College, where Rudy is a struggling student working his way through school, to the glistening Golden Dome of Notre Dame. The point of the shot, made with elegance and grace, is to convey a sense of Rudy’s journey: he’s moving less than a mile away, but his life is about to change forever. The tears shed by Rudy as he opens and reads the letter represent not only an expression of joy over this accomplishment, but an awareness of what it means. It’s nearly a perfect scene, one that captures the spirit of the entire movie.

On the day we filmed, David Anspaugh encouraged me to remain isolated from the rest of the cast and crew, which isn’t something I normally like to do.

“I don’t want you to talk to anybody,” he said. “You’ve got two or three hours before we shoot this thing, so just go away and clear your head. Don’t speak to a soul.”

I did as instructed. To occupy my time, I read the script again, start to finish. I did that a lot on Rudy, partly because I was the star and felt significant pressure to be thoroughly well-versed in the subject matter, but also because I just loved reading the damn story. Anyway, eventually I made my way to the set, and we began rehearsing the sequence. Finally, it was time to shoot the scene. Everything was designed for me to succeed in that moment. I was working with a superbly composed scene and a thoughtful, sympathetic director; I was playing a character with whom I felt an innate connection. So I opened the letter and started to read, and …

Nothing. Not a drop. My tear ducts were dry, my heart empty.

We reset the scene. David shouted “Action,” and again … nothing.

David shuffled over to where I was standing and quietly tried to encourage me. He didn’t want to make a big fuss about it, but the truth is, there was a lot riding on this scene. He knew—and I knew—that if I didn’t nail that moment emotionally, it was a failure, in a big way, on a big stage. I was the title character in a major studio picture. I was expected to come through. Anything less than an honest, heartfelt rendering of the scene would be viewed as a failure on my part. But I was determined to keep trying. I would rather have failed big than to have faked the tears—a truly ignominious defeat.

“You okay?” David asked calmly. I was at once impressed and amused by the utter lack of urgency in his voice. He had the attitude of a great coach or manager who’s dying on the inside, but knows he has to project confidence to his players. And you could tell he was thinking that way. He actually looked like he was playing the part of a coach trying to think of the right thing to say to his athlete.

“I’m fine,” I responded, although I really wasn’t.

David clapped his hands together. “Good, let’s try it again.”

So we did a third take, but that one stunk as well.

Now things were getting complicated. The Notre Dame officials and trustees who had been invited to the set were starting to shift uncomfortably in their seats. The crew members were looking at their watches. Most important of all, the sun was falling in the sky, resulting in the real possibility that David’s gorgeous shot, so dependent on a sun-drenched Golden Dome, would lose some of its luster—or worse, it would have to be postponed to another day.

Once again David stepped out from behind the monitor and walked over to where I was standing, but now his appearance and demeanor had changed. This time he seemed less like a confident major-league baseball manager than a harried office manager who has to get the completed project to his boss by five o’clock if he wants to save his ass—and his job.

“Sean,” he said, with something like panic in his voice, “what’s the problem?”

I didn’t know what to say, how to explain what I was feeling, when what I was feeling was essentially emptiness. I didn’t want to pull a star trip, didn’t want to thrash about and make excuses. I didn’t want to make a big fuss about my shortcomings as an actor to engender sympathy from the director. Instead I just looked at David and said, “I don’t know.”

This was not what he wanted to hear. I’m sure he would have preferred that I communicate to him the root of my anxiety, but I had nothing to offer. So we stood there for a moment, the blocked actor and the panic-stricken director, with what seemed to be a giant clock ticking in the sky above us. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, David held up his hands, palms to the sky, and said out of pure exasperation, “What are you afraid of?”

And that was it, the key that opened the lock. I started sobbing hysterically.

Shocked, David put a hand on my back, presumably to console me. But noooooo. Instead he leaned in and whispered into my ear, “Wait! Please … wait!” It was a crane shot, see, and they had to set it up, and it just wouldn’t have made sense for me to be crying before I even opened the letter.

“Keep it together, Sean,” David urged. “Just hang in there for a minute or two.”

I choked back the tears and wiped my eyes as David rushed off to the monitor. The rest of the crew jumped to attention, and within a minute or two we were filming the scene. And it was beautiful. One take. Pitch-perfect. The scene ends with Rudy running off in celebration, the acceptance letter in his hand. When David yelled, “Cut!” I fell to the ground, completely exhausted. Fifteen minutes passed before my heart stopped racing and I could catch my breath, so cathartic was the experience. Intentionally or not, David had released something within me, and that fear of crying, of being emotionally naked in front of other people, was gone. Looking back on it, I think the emotion was the result of a confluence of events, like a perfect storm. I’d recently gotten married; we were in Indiana, near Christine’s family; my personal life was in place; the ideas of the story were good and right, in line with who I aspired to be. It was just morally right for me to be in that role, trying to embody persistence and determination, and all those things that Rudy is and that I wanted to be. There was no excuse for not doing it right on that particular day, so when David said, “What are you afraid of?” the question was the answer. Simply put, I was afraid. David had struck a nerve, or to risk another metaphor, he pulled my finger out of the dike, allowing the dam to burst.

That was college. Graduate school (in so many ways) was The Lord of the Rings, in particular the scene on the side of Mount Doom.

I can’t recall for certain, but I think new pages for that scene were handed to us the morning of the shoot. I knew we were getting close to filming the scene, and I understood that it would be one of the most important and emotional moments in the film, but I wasn’t quite sure how it would turn out, or even how it was to be depicted. When I looked at the pages that morning and glanced at the dialogue, it seemed at once familiar and fresh. Somehow, it seemed new to me. I read it several times while sitting in the makeup truck, having my feet and ears and hair applied for roughly the three-hundredth time, and I was filled with admiration for the work that the writers had done. Not just because of the way it looked on a cold page, or the way it sounded when I spoke the words, but also because I knew how hard they had worked to get it right. It was impossible, even when I was busy wallowing in self-pity, not to respect Fran and Philippa, for theirs was a never-ending quest. I’ve written screenplays; to me, even under the best of conditions, it’s torture. I can’t imagine what this must have been like for them, or how they survived the experience.

This scene was a perfect example of their talent and commitment. It wasn’t just good; it was great. As I read my lines aloud to Elijah and my makeup artist, Vivienne “Bliss” Macgillicuddy, I reveled in the poetry. By the time we left the makeup truck, I knew my lines cold and couldn’t wait to get started. We took four-wheel-drive vehicles to a base station on Mount Ruapehu, and then hiked twenty minutes to the side of an active volcano that served as a stand-in for Mount Doom. Along the way, Elijah and I rehearsed our lines over and over, not merely because we wanted to be prepared, but because it was fun. This was exactly the type of work I had hoped to do.

Before we shot the scene, I had a flashback to the first day of principal photography, when the production was blessed by Maori elders in a formal ceremony in Wellington. I had no idea what I was getting into then, but there was something in the earnestness of these men, the way they not only offered their encouragement and support, but also reminded us of our obligation, that struck a chord.

“We hope that the land takes care of you,” they had said, “and that you are good stewards of the land. It was here long before you, and it’ll be here long after you leave.”

I understood what that meant. We were on an island in the South Pacific, filming an epic trilogy that would become a part of cinematic history, an indelible stamp on popular culture. Nevertheless, as with all things human, we were but a footnote. Eventually we would all be gone and the movies would be forgotten, but the mountains would still be there. The desert and the jungle, too. In one form or another that thought stayed with me throughout my time in New Zealand. It helped put things in perspective on the bad days and gave me strength in times of anxiety or crisis. On a purely selfish level, it was comforting when flying by helicopter to the top of a rocky, fog-enshrouded peak to know that the production had been blessed by the Maori elders; somehow their approval made it seem less likely that the chopper would slam into the side of the mountain. We tried to be good stewards, and we—at least, those of us who weren’t New Zealanders—tried to be mindful that we were merely visitors.

The thought of that blessing came rushing back to me now as we hiked up Mount Ruapehu, which only a century ago belched ash as far as Wellington. I was in awe of the setting, with its stunning physical beauty, and I was grateful for the opportunity to be there. I felt like I had earned this moment, but I also realized that I was part of something much bigger than myself, and a part of me regretted having indulged the low moments of selfishness and egocentrism (even if they are considered inalienable rights by most members of the acting fraternity). I like to be a good guy, the kind of person who says the right thing and knows the right way to be and doesn’t command attention when it’s not necessary. I just seem to find lots of situations where I can be polite and still be the center of attention, which helps feed my ego without making me a jerk; I’ve generally figured out a way to not be unseemly in order to thrive. In New Zealand, however, I’d gotten myself into a situation where what was appropriate was to be patient and quiet. That was hard for me. I was accustomed to getting reams of positive reinforcement for my work, which simply did not and could not happen on The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson was at the controls of a magnificent, sprawling moviemaking machine, with thousands of workers, each performing at the height of his or her abilities. I wanted a pat on the back, reassurance that my contribution was real and valued, and I wanted it more often than it came. But you know what? The lucidity of hindsight is startling, for I know now that I was treated exactly as I should have been treated. Any more feedback than I received would have been fake, and I’d be horrified now to think I was the one actor on the production who required or received such coddling. Samwise Gamgee neither needed nor deserved that. He wasn’t the kind of character who was going to be the focus of the movie. He would have his moments, just like so many other characters—more of them than most, in fact—and a few that were undeniably powerful. Peter knew that and wasn’t going to go out of his way to make me feel better. Dealing with that realization, day in and day out, was a challenge; knowing I wasn’t the reason people would be flocking to the movie was hard. I had to be a utility player who could score when called upon, but wouldn’t be called upon too often.

Now, however, I was getting a chance to score, and after waiting for such a long time, well, it was meaningful. It was important. Having kept a lid on my emotions—both personally and professionally—for so many months, I was eager to do some real acting, and when the opportunity finally presented itself, I was relieved to discover that I had a command of the material. There was no reason for it not to be that way, of course. I’d spent months working with dialect coaches. I’d read the books and understood the story. I’d done other crying scenes, so I understood the culture of the set: I knew there would be respect for the actors and the process. I knew Peter would be patient and encouraging. There was nothing precious about it. I simply understood on every level what needed to happen at that moment.

There was something else I knew: the crying scene, the tender scene, would be immediately followed by the heroic scene, the scene in which Sam hoists a weakened Frodo onto his back and carries him up the side of the mountain (“I can’t carry the ring for you, but I can carry you!”). That was my moment to become the Sam I envisioned, the Sam who was strong and noble and not a bumbling buffoon. You can drive yourself crazy if you spend too much time thinking about the implications of a scene like that, but I knew subconsciously that four years hence, when The Return of the King was released, that scene would be everywhere. If any scene would get the audience to feel uplifted and satisfied, that was it.

The filming was almost uneventful, which is strange because it was an inherently dangerous sequence. We didn’t use stunt doubles. I wore a harness in the event that I slipped and tumbled off a precipice, but Elijah employed no such safety measures. He simply and bravely, maybe even foolishly, climbed onto my back and allowed his body to go limp. As I trudged up the side of the mountain, with my prosthetic feet slipping and sliding through the gravel, I remember thinking, Holy shit! I’ve got the whole $270 million franchise on my shoulders right now. Maybe the crew had some sense that if I fell, they’d be able to catch Elijah, but in my estimation, he was in real danger.

Through the fog of memory, however, that scene has faded, while the emotional moment that preceded it has gained even greater clarity. It was a nearly perfect acting experience. I felt like I had complete control over my instrument, that I could cry and quiver and emote, and tears would stream down, and it was real and authentic. When Peter came out from behind the monitors, both Elijah and I realized we had nailed the scene. Peter is so conservative and stoic; I mean, he carries himself lightly. He bounces around the set and gets down on one knee to feel closer to the action, but he’s not a guy who is overly dramatic. This is generally an admirable trait in a director. Peter won’t panic if he’s losing light, or not getting exactly what he wants from an actor, or otherwise suffering the frustrations of a typical movie production. He uses his language and his actual authority to ask people to do their jobs and to do them well. Simple as that.

There is no hysteria in Peter Jackson, although there probably should be once in a while, if only to strike fear into the hearts of his cast. If you think you’re going to piss off the director, and he’s going to scream at you and humiliate you in front of everyone, you want to get it right. Intimidation can trigger a performance. Take Oliver Stone, for example. I’m sure crying in front of him is easy, because if you come up empty, he’ll make you suffer. Peter will just be disappointed, and then he’ll come up with something to take the place of what you didn’t deliver. In this case, though, we had delivered. That much was apparent from Peter’s reaction. It wasn’t so much what he said that was meaningful. (He offered a simple instruction: “Sean, could you move your hand this way a little bit?”) It was the fact that his glasses were all fogged up and tears were streaming down his cheeks.

Yes! We did it!

Knowing that we’d reached Peter was galvanizing. I felt like a fighter who sees blood in an opponent: Time to go in for the kill! And that’s what we did. Elijah and I kept going at it, take after take, and each time it got better. I loved reading the speech and kept doing it over and over, with escalating emotion. It was amazing: I felt like I was crying from the bottom of my soul. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced on a movie set. It’s a rare thing where your expectations are met or exceeded and everything works out exactly as you hoped, and this was such a time. We had peaked at exactly the right moment.

When Peter yelled, “Cut!” I felt a rush of adrenaline. I picked Elijah up and practically lifted him over my head. We hugged and exchanged high fives and pumped our fists. And we weren’t alone in exulting. The boom operator came over and told us how moving the scene had been. The camera operator said he was having a hard time looking through the eyepiece because he was crying so hard. Admittedly, movie sets are prone to groupthink, wherein the director or the cinematographer or someone else pays you a compliment, and suddenly everyone jumps on the bandwagon and it’s all kind of bullshit. In your heart, you know you’ve done nothing special. But this was different. This was real. We all recognized the importance of the scene, of getting it just right. This was the climax of the story; done properly, it would serve as a tribute to Tolkien and the fans of Tolkien, and it would honor the studio that had gambled $270 million. Everything pointed to this moment. Either we were going to succeed and thus validate the support of those who had believed in us, or we were going to fail.

And if we failed, I would perceive it as my failure.

So I think everyone on the set that day experienced the scene in much the same way that audiences would experience it later: as a genuinely cathartic moment.

The next day Elijah and I got a fax from Fran and Philippa, saying, in effect, “You guys rock!” I have to say, I didn’t get a lot of faxes like that, which only served to make it more meaningful. And for the next three years, regardless of the ups and downs, the anxiety over being in the background at many of the premieres and media functions and awards show that accompanied the first two movies, because Sam wasn’t worth much attention, I had this to sustain me. Someday, I knew, audiences would see it. They’d see Sam cradling Frodo, expressing the purest form of love and strength, and they’d hear him talking about springtime in the shire … and they would weep.

Someday …

*   *   *

That the scenes between Frodo and Sam provoke such a visceral emotional response in audiences speaks volumes about the purity of Tolkien’s writing, and the characters he created. There is, after all, an abundance of tenderness and closeness between male characters in The Lord of the Rings, more than one might reasonably expect to find in a blockbuster Hollywood epic, a fact that moviegoers have generally accepted without reservation. And yet there exists an ongoing debate, in both critical and casual conversation, over whether there is an undercurrent of homosexuality in both Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s movies.

Simply and succinctly put: Are Frodo and Sam gay?

I think it’s a legitimate question. A lot has been written about homoeroticism throughout the three-year cycle of the movies, and many people on the Internet have had a field day fantasizing about the hobbits or writing humor pieces. I’ve even been interviewed on this subject by both The Advocate and Out, two of the most visible and successful publications that cater to a gay audience. So I do think it’s a subject worth discussing; in fact, it would be a bit spineless not to.

There was an inordinate amount of male bonding during the film-ing of The Lord of the Rings. When you put a bunch of men together in a relatively confined space, with little female influence to mitigate their bad behavior, things can and do get ugly. Raunch was often the order of the day, and as in any all-male environment (locker rooms, army barracks, prison cell blocks), there was a lot of juvenile behavior: ass grabbing, horrifyingly graphic insults regarding anatomy and sexual proclivities, and various permutations of gay jokes that have been around since the dawn of time. Or at least the dawn of Monty Python.

I’m not talking about making jokes about homosexuals who weren’t in our presence, but rather making jokes that centered on the possibility that any one of us might be gay. I think that happens a lot with guys in such circumstances. When you change clothes together, eat meals together, travel together, and get your makeup and hair done together (okay, maybe that’s a bad example), you can’t help but grow close, and humor, perhaps defensive humor, arises out of that scenario. But when it comes to the actual sexuality of the characters, I don’t think there’s anything there. I don’t believe Sam and Frodo are homosexual. I really don’t. That said, I think it’s true that if two males live together for a long time, travel together, and share almost every aspect of their lives, it’s inevitable that they develop a rapport, and I can see why gay men might identify with their relationship. I’ve tried to be very careful in interviews not to disavow anyone else’s take on it. I’m not bothered in the least that some people—maybe even a lot of people—enjoy the notion of Frodo or Sam as gay.

That’s not how I played the character, and it’s not how I see the character, but it’s okay. To me, The Lord of the Rings depicts a powerful bond of love between two male hobbits, with the complete absence of sexuality. In that sense, it’s remarkably innocent and pure. Not everyone sees it that way, of course. A New York journalist once told me how angry he had become when he first saw the movie because a small portion of the audience was giggling during some of the tender moments. I want to be careful not to intrude upon anyone’s interaction or personal experience with the material. That’s their privilege, their right. But this guy was annoyed, and he asked me if I thought there was a lot of cynicism about the relationship between Frodo and Sam. I told him I didn’t think so. Some people might not be accustomed to experiencing that level of emotional honesty in their own lives, and they might want to cover up the fact that they felt something by being cynical or irreverent. The giggling, especially among adolescent males—who make up a significant percentage of the audience—is an involuntary response to something that makes them feel awkward. Thus, you could argue that the movie is accomplishing something simply by facilitating that nervous giggle; it’s cracked the armor in which some people wrap their emotional lives. Personally, I think that’s a great achievement.

Elijah and I never had a serious discussion about this subject. Not one. I must admit, however, that we did engage in a broad range of homosexual humor with each other, and with Billy and Dom. It was just another way of relating that wasn’t meant as an affront to anyone. Look, I was raised in Hollywood. I’ve had, and continue to have, more gay friends than I can count. But we did enjoy the jokes. It was a way to release tension, and to acknowledge what was on everyone’s mind in a way that seemed harmless and funny.

Most of the time, while acting, it didn’t cross my mind. The scene on Mount Doom, for example, was uncolored by sexuality. Sam is cradling Frodo in his arms, crying over the possible loss of his friend. They are fellow travelers, warriors, brothers. To me, that plays less like a love scene than a battlefield death scene. But there were other times—in scenes when the envelope was pushed in a way that invited not just speculation, but an arched eyebrow as well—when as a male actor working with another male, you couldn’t help but think, Oh, God, that is so gay!

Near the end of The Return of the King, for example, the reunited hobbits gather around a healing Frodo and hug him and hold his hand, and eventually they begin jumping on the bed together, and it’s like, Okay, do you guys want to be alone for a little while? I think our standard of awkwardness was significantly higher than an adolescent boy’s, but there was a standard, and when it was met, either because of a longing look that you could see magnified tenfold on a monitor, or because someone inadvertently touched the backside of a fellow hobbit—well, it provoked laughter.

There was one rather memorable day during the looping phase of the production when Elijah and I were working on a scene in which Sam reaches around Frodo to lift him off the ground. The technicians kept rewinding and playing the scene as we tried to match dialogue to the film—back and forth, back and forth—the result being a slightly pornographic image of what appeared to be Sam having his way with Frodo from behind. Elijah and I fell victim to our most sophomoric tendencies in this setting, as we looped dialogue appropriate for the moment.

What can I say? These were the kinds of jokes that sometimes bubbled to the surface over the course of an eighteen-month shoot. Sometimes they helped us get through the day. I’m sure it would be off-putting to some people, but to us it was funny, and it seemed harmless.

To me, though, the emotional scenes involving Sam and Frodo stand on their own merit. Whatever is at stake is what it’s about. If you prefer to think of Sam and Frodo as two gay males, that’s fine. You could take that reading of the relationship and extend it as long as you want to, and it would sustain that reading. When Frodo says good-bye and kisses Sam on the forehead, it’s whatever it is. It’s sweet and tender and honest. And that’s all that really matters. But don’t forget something. Sam did go on to marry Rosie Cotton. And he was, as it turned out, a rather prolific little hobbit.

As far I’m concerned, it comes down to this: Sam is the best friend anyone could ever hope for. His relationship with Frodo is a perfect study in dedication, devotion, and heartfelt companionship. Despite the hundreds of interactions I’ve had with folks who prefer to see the bond between Frodo and Sam through a prism of homoeroticism, I remain convinced that the power of their friendship derives primarily from the purity and innocence of their love for one another. As the member of a beautiful if untraditional hodgepodge of a family, and someone who has had connections with and lost touch with more people I consider friends than many folks ever meet in a lifetime, I gain strength from my understanding of the character I got to play.

Sam probably knows that time and experience reveal the true nature of our loyalty, and that even after extraordinary circumstances real friends emerge from the scars they have caused one another with a deeper understanding of just how important they are to each other. Making movies brings you into extremely close contact with tens of thousands of people over the course of a career (a fact that can be simultaneously thrilling and exhausting). It occurs to me that stardom is won oftentimes by the formation and retention of close alliances with those practiced in the art of success through a series of critical decisions. To the extent that cynicism plays a mitigating part in that selection process, I am saddened. Conversely, I love it when strategic interpersonal alliances are formed in organic ways. I usually can’t quite help myself when I feel the impulse to “make a new friend,” and I’m not above trying to capitalize on the formation of a new friendship with someone who can help me. You see, because I played Sam, a lot of people ask me questions about myself and just what kind of friend I really am. I’ve gotten the impression from folks that they are looking to me, Sean, as an authority on the nature of friendship. I’ve worried, frankly, that I’m not worthy.

My personality is such that I try to meet or exceed the positive expectations that many have of me and for me. When I’m traveling, I think sometimes that people are saddened because they realize or sense that I may not be as good a friend as Sam. I am always quick to point out that in fact I am not as good a friend as Sam; I couldn’t be, because fundamentally I’m too selfish. My wife and others have a hard time understanding what I mean when I tell them that I like to be “used.” I’m not going to bore you too much with my half-baked philosophy, but I do think there can be real value to heartfelt, sensitive, respectful engagement in discovering where mutual self-interests can collide when you meet people. But friendship? That is something else. I’ve come to learn that friendship is more about making an effort to act on your thoughtfulness toward others than trying to get stuff out of them, even when you honestly believe that you give as good as you get.

I guess I’ll have a lifetime to consider how playing Sam has affected my life, but at the very least, I’d like to believe that he taught me that it’s worth trying to be a better friend than I was before I played him. In that regard, my journey of self-discovery and individual improvement continues.