Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, who played Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck and Peregrin “Pippin” Took respectively in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, have revealed a shocking insight regarding the direction the producers wanted to take the beloved films during production.
In an interview with IGN to promote their The Lord of the Rings podcast, The Friendship Onion, the duo revealed that director and co-writer Peter Jackson was asked to kill off one of the four hobbits featured in the story despite none of them dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels.
“It’s a good job that didn’t happen because it would have been me. … It definitely would have. There’s no way they are killing Frodo and Sam, and the only ones that would be left would be Merry and Pippin. They wouldn’t kill Pippin because Pippin has a really strong story with Gandalf. It would have definitely been me. I think Pete quite rightly was like, ‘This is a luminary piece of written work, and we need to stick close to the text.’ So, he stuck by his guns. Yeah, I’m thankful that didn’t happen.”
Fortunately, Jackson refused to kill off any of the hobbits despite the pressure from the producers above him. However, it is interesting to speculate which one of the four would have been killed off the higher-ups got their way with Monaghan even predicting that his character Merry would have been the one to meet his end.
