Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy made a lot of people a lot of money, but as it turns out, the film’s stars were not among the people receiving huge paychecks. In a recent interview with Business Insider, Elijah Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the trilogy, confirmed that he and the rest of the cast did not receive a ton of money to be in the movies, which famously took a full year to shoot.
“Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life,” Wood explained, referring to the fact that the production was continuous across all three films.
New Line Cinemas, which financed all three movies up front, took a “massive gamble” in doing so, according to Wood. As a result, the cast were not paid “massive salaries.” Wood acknowledged, though, that that wasn’t the only reason to sign on to the movies: “The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives forever.”
In 2019, Orlando Bloom told Howard Stern that he made just $175,000 across all three films, and Sean Astin has said that he was paid $250,000. Wood didn’t offer up a specific number, but he was certainly right about the legacy of the films. They may not have turned him into a millionaire, but they remain among the most important films in the history of the medium for many fans more than 20 years later.
