„I Couldn’t Believe What I Saw”. Here's Why Saruman Actor Christopher Lee Boycotted The Lord of the Rings Premiere
Christopher Lee did not attend the premiere of The Lord of the Rings movie because he was angered by the director's decision.
One of the memorable roles in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films was created by Christopher Lee, who played Saruman. The character played by him was last seen at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. After that he suddenly disappeared and we know nothing about his further fate in the movies.
This surprised not only LOTR fans, but also Lee himself, who, going into the screening of the third film, did not expect it to be missing from the screen. He told the story during a visit to University College Dublin in 2011.
We were all shown the films in private, and when the third film came on, I couldn’t believe what I saw, because I wasn’t in it. The scene is one of the most important scenes in the whole trilogy because it’s Saruman, the great mortal enemy, the most evil of them all, against the Fellowship. It was a long sequence, the final confrontation between the Fellowship and their greatest enemy. And it wasn’t in the film. No one could understand it. Not just Tolkien fans and film fans but everybody who had seen the first two. They said, “What happened to Saruman?”.
Lee felt offended by the director's decision, and so much so that he decided to boycott the premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which he did not attend. The men later managed to reconcile, however, and Lee even appeared in The Hobbit, which Jackson directed.
The director also explained why he cut Saruman's plot in the films so abruptly. He said that there was no room in the second part for a seven-minute recap of the Battle of Helm's Deep, so he thought about putting it at the beginning of the third, but also abandoned it there in the end, because he came to the conclusion that it didn't fit the concept. At the time, the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King gave the impression of being the ending of the previous film, rather than the opening of the new one.
As a result, Jackson decided to include these scenes in the extended version, which was originally only available on DVD.
