Adrien Brody regrets turning down Lord of the Rings role

There are countless actors out there who auditioned but failed to get parts in what would become major movies, but there are others who just flat out turned down those very same roles. That can naturally lead to some regret, and that must have been what Adrien Brody felt when he saw what a success Peter Jackon’s Lord of the Rings trilogy became.

During a career retrospective with GQ, Adrien Brody said that he had been approached about appearing in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of The Lord of the Rings franchise.

I, somehow, didn’t grasp it. I don’t know what part I would have been right for, but it was some Hobbit-like character. I was looking for something else.

“I remember going to see Lord of the Rings in the theater with an ex-girlfriend,” Brody continued. “And she turned to me and said, ‘You passed on Lord of the Rings?!’ I remember feeling so stupid. But I don’t think I would have gotten the role of Jack in Peter’s [King Kong]. I don’t think that would have translated.” The actor played the role of Jack Driscoll in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and although he didn’t get to experience Middle-Earth, he did get to have the big-budget epic experience. “At the time it was Universal’s biggest movie. We had a premiere in  Times Square and they shut down all of Times Square,” Brody said. “The mayor was there and introduced us to the city… It was a big deal. My face was immortalized on a McDonald’s soda cup. When does that happen for anyone?“

Adrien Brody will next be seen in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which has been described as “a love letter to journalists set at an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city.” The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and will hit theaters on October 22, 2021. Brody can also be seen in the third season of HBO’s Succession, which recently debuted.