20 years ago, on December 19, 2001, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in theaters, and the landscape of fantasy filmmaking was changed forever with Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's series. The massive success of Fellowship of the Ring would go on to be followed by two equally successful sequels in 2002's The Two Towers and 2003's Return of the King. This year, Fellowship of the Ring was also selected for inclusion in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, which recognizes films for their cultural or historical significance.
In celebration of Fellowship of the Ring's 20th anniversary, Collider had the chance to chat with Sean Astin, who played the loyal hobbit and steadfast friend Samwise Gamgee. In the following interview, which you can both watch above and read below, Astin spoke about how his perspective on Sam is different now than it was when he first played the character 20 years ago and how the films defined his own career for all that time. He also spoke about how he's reading Fellowship with the Ring with fans as part of his new book club on Fable, why Sam is a great literary character, and why his commitment is to approach the book as a fan without any pressure on himself.
Collider: It's such a pleasure to be talking with you, what with Fellowship [of the Ring] having its anniversary this weekend and everything.
SEAN ASTIN: Carly! We're still alive!
Miraculously, right? Looking back on the movie, for you especially, people associate with you with Sam. But how do you feel about him now at this point in your life, as opposed to when you were playing him for the first time? Has your perspective on the character changed in the time since then?
ASTIN: Well, my depth of understanding him changes all the time. I mean, just in this series of interviews I've been doing, I talked to one person about the fact that Sam is a Ring-Bearer. When Shelob stabs Frodo, and Sam thinks he's dead, Sam takes the Ring. He realizes Frodo's not dead. He goes up to the Tower of Cirith Ungol, he kills Shagrat, and then Frodo wants the Ring back. So yesterday, 20 years and the day after the movies I realized, it's the first time that it occurred to me that he didn't put the Ring on. Unless he did. Did he put it on to hide from the orcs? I don't think he did.
So fable.co is a new platform that has book clubs, and I have a book club. We just finished my first one, which is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The publisher of Lord of the Rings granted us the right to use it just a week ago. So we switched from the book I was going to do to Lord of the Rings. And we're going to do a chapter a week. We started yesterday. It's an amazing thing. I made a determination with the members of the book club to try and experience it the best [that] I can not from Sam's point of view.
I didn't even know what Lord of the Rings was when my agent called me. Would've been late spring of '99. She's like, "It's the Lord of the Rings trilogy." I'm like, "What's that?" She goes, "The Hobbit. It's The Hobbit." I'm like, "What?" So that's bad. But I went to the bookstore. And I went in there, [because] she said I was going to audition for Sam. So from the second I heard of the existence of these things, I heard the name Lord of the Rings and the character of Sam. So everything I've experienced from Lord of the Rings has been from Sam's point of view.
So I feel like I could do a dissertation, or maybe I have, on Sam. But in terms of perspective about him, I mean, he's so reliable. He's so reliable in his ethics, in his choices, the choices of Master Samwise, but just as a literary character, he's such a reliable literary character.
For sure. And a devoted friend, too.
ASTIN: Yeah. It's reliable that he's a devoted friend and never is compromised. So the story takes you in all these different places and all these different conflicts and all these ... But the one thing that you can go back to and can have faith in is that at least there's Sam by your side all the time. It's just one thread of many to focus on. So I don't think my perspective on that has changed.
I'm 50 years old now. I'm a 50-year-old man. I come to these books now as a different entity. I have three kids now. The youngest one's about to finish high school. So I wonder as I come into this how I'll experience Sam differently this time from before. But one thing [that] is immutable is just his faithfulness. That fidelity is... We need it so much in this world. You need it, or else there's just chaos. So it's an amazing thing that Tolkien created this character that can provide that to us. You know?
Definitely. I'm glad you brought up the book club, because that was actually going to be my next question, which is first of all — and you already answered this — when you first read the books, but also: what do you enjoy about getting to do this buddy read with the fans officially?
ASTIN: Well, okay. So I tell people that the first ... I read it three times while we were making the films, but it was more like I was being in a cockpit of a plane that the engines had just gone out, and you're looking at your checklist. And you're just reading through it, trying to find the little piece of information that I need to know in order to get the engine to start back up. It was like data mining. I was hard-charging through the book so I could appreciate the literature. I could appreciate the descriptions of the topography and all that. But I didn't enjoy the books in the way that fans for 20 years have been describing to me how they enjoy the books.
So now even that creates its own sense of pressure about my relationship to the books, about any of our relationship to the books who worked on the films. So my commitment is to just try and let that go. And we're reading it in... The plan is to read it in bite-size chunks. I know people who read the book every year, and it takes them two days. They go into a room, they close the door, and they come out two days later with tears streaked on their face, feeling like they're recharged for the next year. I can't do that. The reading's too dense. The ideas are too evocative and provocative. So, to me, I just want to take each of these chapters, I think we're doing one a week or something, and just tune out, turn off the alerts on my phone.
I'm in graduate school at the moment. I just took my final yesterday. I have a managerial economic class I just took, I passed it barely. I know you're wondering. But I'm on the plane, and I'm like, "Okay, how can I decompress from that?" What's the trick of the mind that allows you to totally focus on what you're doing so that you can be completely relaxed while you're doing it?
It's like golf. I don't know if you ever played golf. Golf, you have to be focused and relaxed at the same time. I mean, what I came away with from the first six or seven pages on the plane last night was just this light tone about these ... Concerning Hobbits. It's this lovely pastoral land and they're fat, and they're happy. And in a weird way, it can't last. It wouldn't be a good book if it lasted. So I'm wanting to meet the book where the book's wanting me to be. The book wants me to have anticipation for what's coming next. So I'm wanting to calibrate that. It's going to be an amazing new experience.
And what I've been saying is, the movies are 20 years old. You've got this DVD set now, the 31 DVDs, this ultimate collection. It's the super ultimate, mondo, you-got-to-be-kidding-me, ridiculous, I-didn't-know-that-there-was-so-much-love-in-the-world collection of Lord of the Rings. [And] for me, nothing can take away the movies. Nothing can take away the 20 years of fandom that's come at me, all the conventions and autographs and interviews and the awards shows and everything that's gone into it. It's defined my whole life from my 30s to my 50s. Nothing can ever take that [away].
So now I can actually afford to read the books without pressure, without the pressure of my career, and [thinking] "What's the impact going to be on my career? What are my agents going to think?" All of that stuff that operates in your neurology, when I was making my bones, so to speak. But now my acting career is going to go where it's going to go. I'll continue to work.
When I finished Lord of the Rings. I was like, "What if I never work again?" Peter Jackson teased me at one point. Because we were playing these little hobbits. And it's cute, and it's funny, and it's sweet. But in a way, we're diminutive. And in a way that it's charming, it's also can be kind of pejorative. We had these doubles that were filming. BK [Bhoja 'BK' Kannada] was my double, he's three feet tall. He's a 30-year-old man, and he was patient with all of us. And we developed a level of... mostly because he would beat me at chess and have more knowledge in our geopolitical discussions than I did. And I was always learning from him. But that aside, I just remember having a moment of concern. And Peter's like, "You mean, you think you're going to walk into an audition two years from now and they're going to be like, 'Oh, we thought you were going to be like a little...'?" (laughs) And I'm like, "Yeah." And come to think of it, that's all behind me now.
I give talks about mental health all over the country. And the country was in a mental health crisis, particularly children, before the pandemic. And now we have the pandemic and soon to hopefully be post-pandemic. And the damage that's been done to our emotional and psychiatric and psychological life, won't be fully understood for a decade.
We try to ignore it. We're just moving past it. Everybody's doing their own thing, but there's going to be scholars. There's going to be tests done. Through the lens of history, you'll look back at this moment, you'll go, "Holy crap. That was an amazing thing." Nothing like that had ever happened, where the entire planet shut down, where people were forced to stay away from each other.
And the more you love someone, the more you were interested, the more intensely you wanted to stay away from them in order to protect them. That is a psychological thing that we don't know how to deal with. So these speeches that Samwise gets to give, "There's some good left in this world and it's worth fighting for." "Even darkness must pass and a new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer." There are things that Tolkien put in here that are the result of a lifetime of high quality, intellectual focus, and spiritual focus, forged in the fires of [the] First World War and is apparent of someone in the Second World War. And it's here, it's right in this little book.
I'm using the members of the book club as a tether. And they're using me as a pace car. And together, I'm hoping... you just sit and read the book. Yes. Read the book. Oh, it's great. It's so much more than that. The tens of thousands of people who I have personally met over 20 years who have tattooed themselves into oblivion with Lord of the Rings language and mythology and imagery, imagery from the movies, our faces tattooed on their bodies, doctors and lawyers and plumbers and homeless people, [those] people look to the books... look to the movies. They're bigger than movies, they're bigger than books.