Elijah Wood says ‘Lord of the Rings’ pay was not enough to ‘rest easy for the rest of your life’

Elijah Wood has joined Cate Blanchett in revealing that the massively profitable Lord of the Rings trilogy did not result in massive paydays for its cast.

“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 told Business Insider on Wednesday at the Texas Film Awards.

Wood explained that director Peter Jackson and production company New Line Cinema took “a real gamble” on the trilogy adaptation of the novel series by J.R.R. Tolkien back in 1999. One of the compromises undertaken to make the ambitious shoot possible was the film’s stars not being granted “massive salaries.” Another was an agreement to shoot all three films back to back, leaving no time for those stars to renegotiate their contracts should the films do well financially, an otherwise common practice in Hollywood.

It’s something of an understatement to say the films performed well at the box office; between them, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King grossed $2.9 billion worldwide, securing a spot among the highest-earning film franchises in history.

Wood displays no bitterness that the films he helped launch to success didn’t yield a handsome payout in return. “The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives forever,” he said.

Wood joins his several other denizens of Middle-earth in shedding light on the apparent disparity between the franchise’s astounding earnings and correspondingly low salaries for its stars.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Last August, Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen asked Blanchett, who played the elf Galadriel in all three films, if Lord of the Rings constituted her biggest payday. “Are you kidding me?” she responded. “No, no one got paid anything to do that movie.”

“I wanted to work with the guy who made Braindead,” Blanchett explained, citing Jackson’s gonzo 1992 zombie film. “I mean, I basically got free sandwiches, and I got to keep my ears…. No, no one got paid anything.”

When asked about Blanchett’s comments, Wood explained that “statements like that are not made with any kind of ire…. It’s such an honor to have been a part of those films, and they represent some of the best experiences of my life.”

Orlando Bloom, who played the prominent warrior elf Legolas in the films, revealed in 2019 on The Howard Stern Show that he was paid only $175,000 for his work. “I got nothing,” he joked, but concurred with Wood, calling the opportunity “the greatest gift of my life…. I’d do it for half the money.”