Peter Jackson has the bad habbit of hiring bad casting agents. Hence, when the moment arrives where all the extras have to be rounded up for some scene or other, nine out of ten random crew members and/or their relatives (who just so happen to be on set that day) will be asked to fill in the blanks, so to speak. This explains the unsettling amount of the quite adorably cute Katie & Billy Jackson, as well as such random cameos as Hannah Wood, Henry Mortensen and a nearly unrecognizable Richard Taylor.
At such desperate times, Jackson is known to sometimes – though, of course, very much against his own wishes – join the cast to make up for his casting agents’ lack of insight in the necessity of sufficient extras for large mass scenes. Which is only logical, since it’s *his* casting agents that screwed up in the first place.
You may be surprised to discover this, and think to yourself: ‘This Figwit character is completely out of her mind, and I’m never listening to anything she writes again.’ You would, of course, be right, except that this time, I have proof.
You know the guy who eats the carrot in Bree? It’s pretty difficult to miss him, since he’s rather huge and cloggs the screen when the hobbits arrive in the drizzling rain and near-dark, and with the huge carrot being distractingly there.
This, my dearest readers, is Peter Jackson! Yes, it is! Go check it out – you’ll recognize him by his trademark boorishness.
But that’s not all! If you look very closely during the battle of Helm’s Deep, you might catch a glimpse of some guys throwing little rocks from the Hornburg down to the Uruk-hai mindlesly trying to crash the gate with a toothpick below them. This is Barrie Osbourne, aka Mister Producer Sir, with some kid who’s related to some crew member in some way. Anyhoo – the guy who throws the very shiny spear right after that, is once again Peter Jackson!
If you thought that, after doing so much work for ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and ‘The Two Towers’, the casting agents wouldn’t make such terrible mistakes for ‘The Return of the King’ – think again! They only got worse! Amongst an award-winning parade of hastily scrambled together cameos (including the inevitable Billy and Katie Jackson, Richard Taylor, Rick Porras and Howard Shore), Peter Jackson appears once again as that rastafari-dude on the Corsairs’ ship.
Sadly, this scene was also the last one to include Peter Jackson, ever, because – as you faithful viewers of the movie will know – the director was shot through the heart by a murderous Orlando Bloom who discovered that in the book, Legolas doesn’t nancy around at all! [But made it look like the Dwarf did it.] (Rumour has it that Jackson has been reconstructed, although slightly less well filled-out, by the blokes at WETA, who abused his name to make a movie about one very ugly gorilla.)
by Figwit
Editor’s Note: There is one case, however, in which PJ’s casting agents didn’t go wrong:
