On the set of The Lord of the Rings, some were injured, but one actor even had to go to the hospital

During the filming of a scene in The Return of the King, an actor was injured so severely by a prop that he even had to go to the hospital. MeinMMO reveals what it’s all about.

Who is it about? Almost everyone has heard about Viggo Mortensen’s (Aragorn) injury during the filming of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The story has practically become legendary. In a scene, Aragorn believes that Merry and Pippin have been brutally killed by Orcs. In his rage, he kicks the helmet of an Uruk-hai and breaks two toes. Orlando Bloom also got injured when he fell off a horse and broke several ribs.

But these two were far from the only ones on the set of The Lord of the Rings who got injured. During the filming of The Return of the King, Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) was also not spared.

Elijah Wood was injured during the spider scene

How did Elijah Wood get injured? In the third part, Frodo is hit by Shelob’s sting (the creepy giant spider), which severely wounds him and brings him close to death. However, during the filming of this key scene, Elijah Wood suffered a real injury from a prop object that represented the sting. This information was later revealed in the Extended Edition DVD. There, Wood and his colleague Sean Astin (who plays Sam) discuss the background of this scene.

How serious was it? Wood describes how the sting from the prop object was not only extremely painful but actually led to a serious injury that required medical treatment. The injury was so serious that Wood had to spend several days in the hospital recovering before he could return to the set.

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Wood and Astin even joked during this time about using an appendicitis as an excuse for the hospital stay. The irony was that they speculated whether this incident might have actually led to Elijah Wood’s real appendicitis in 2003. Sean Astin was also not spared from injuries on set. At the end of the first film, he ran into a river and stepped on a glass shard. Ouch! Did you know? One of the most epic images in the Lord of the Rings film was not makeup, but a real injury.