Why Christopher Lee boycotted the premiere of ‘Lord of the Rings: Return of the King’
It’s fair to say that Christopher Lee lived one hell of a life. Before his excellent acting career, he’d served in the Royal Air Force in World War II and later sang opera and worked with a series of heavy metal bands. Then came the acting itself, with remarkable performances in the likes of The Man with the Golden Gun, the Star Wars prequels and a series of movies for Tim Burton.
Of course, one cannot talk about Christopher Lee without mentioning his unbelievable turn as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, directed by Peter Jackson and released in the early 2000s. Lee’s effort as Saruman provided the film with one of its main antagonists, and he made the villain one of its most memorable characters.
While Lee played a crucial part in the film’s narrative, excellence and its wider cultural legacy, he had actually found a part of the third part – Return of the King – to be completely misaligned with the novel source material, of which he was known to be a big fan. Seeing as The Lord of the Rings movies are so long, they had to be cut down into versions suitable for a theatrical release.
As such, Peter Jackson had to make a series of decisions in which parts he had to cut out. This led to the director’s cut versions of the films, which many consider to be the “definitive versions”. There’s a glaring omission in The Return of the King because the scene in which Saruman dies had to be cut from the versions shown in cinemas, even though it’s still over three hours long.
The novel states that the White Wizard is killed by his former ally Wormtongue but by the time the film version arrived, audiences had no idea what had become of Saruman because Jackson had cut his death scene from the edit. The result was that Lee actually boycotted the premiere of Return of the King.
In a 2011 Q&A session at University College Dublin, Lee explained his shock at discovering the cut scene. “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,” he said. “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.”
The scene had Saruman on top of the tower at Isengard, telling Aragorn that he will never be king. “It was a long sequence, the final confrontation between the Fellowship and their greatest enemy. And it wasn’t in the film,” Lee noted. “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 had naturally been upset by Jackson’s creative decision as he thought he’d taken liberties with the source material that were not warranted. He refused to show up for the premiere of the final piece of the trilogy, but thankfully, the actor and director later made up, and Jackson convinced him to take part in The Hobbit movies, even though Saruman had not actually featured in Tolkien’s novels, showing perhaps that Lee hadn’t had as much worry about the faithfulness of the adaptations as he’d first made out.
Check out Saruman’s death scene from the director’s cut version of Return of the King below.
