During this year’s Calgary Expo, the four Hobbit actors from The Lord of the Rings got to reunite after a decade and revealed some juicy trivia about Peter Jackson’s immortal cinematic trilogy. One of these revelations involved a scene that has been memed to death since The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, and it seems the crew almost didn’t get it due to weather shenanigans in New Zealand.
As Dominic Monaghan (Merry Brandybuck) explained it to IGN, the famous “second breakfast” scene would’ve been filmed in half a day, but the director required them to do it in 45 minutes.
“That was an incredibly rushed scene because it started flash-snowing,” He said. “And [director Peter Jackson] basically came over to us and was like, ‘You’ve got about 45 minutes to an hour to get this and go, otherwise we’re in real trouble with all of our gear.’ And we got what ended up being a real amazing moment in the film, but it was fast.”
Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) says that the scene was supposed to be shot in half a day which, given Peter Jackson’s perfectionist attitude while filming, isn’t exactly difficult to imagine. Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee), meanwhile, wondered if anyone else cared about that scene, because it wasn’t significant to the plot.
But thank Eru Ilúvatar that the Hobbits cared, or else we’d have to live the rest of our lives ignorant of one of the most iconic, memed, and quoted moments in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.