The lovely reason behind that Lord of the Rings reunion photo

While it’s marvellous to think that the stars of the Lord of the Rings movies just meet up in secret once in a while to regale stories and sing Hobbit ballads about their time in Middle Earth, their recent meeting had a motive equally as cockle-warming.

A few weeks back, Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, Dominic Monaghan, Elijah Wood and Billy Boyd were snapped after what appeared to be a reunion dinner.

It sent LOTR fans into a state of rapture, Monaghan captioning that they were assembled to do battle with a ‘cave troll’, and with the pic grabbing nearly 70,000 likes.

But Viggo, aka Strider, aka Aragorn, son of Arathorn, gathered the Hobbits – and an elf – together for other reasons, namely to make the night of the young stars of his movie, ‘Captain Fantastic’, in which he plays the widowed father of six children, living an unorthodox life ‘off the grid’ in the Washington wilderness.

In LA for the SAG Awards, he feared that they might go home empty handed, so he set something special up to make up for it.

“We were all hoping we’d win best ensemble so we could make fools of ourselves onstage,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

“But then everybody was going to go their separate ways — some of the kids are from Oklahoma, Australia, England — so I invited them all out for dinner afterwards because I figured it was likely that we weren’t going to win and it was going to be sad to end that way.

“The youngest kids were big fans of ‘Lord of the Rings’, so as surprise guests I invited the ones who were around and in town — Dominic Monaghan, Bill Boyd, Elijah Wood, and Orlando Bloom.

“Three hobbits and an elf showed up. You should have seen the look on the Captain Fantastic kids’ faces. It was really something. So it was a great gathering of two families that stayed in touch.”

Geezer.

Mind you, the ‘Lord of the Rings’ stars have remained close since their epic three movies together wrapped in 2003.

Sir Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Sean Astin, Bill Boyd, Viggo Mortensen, Dominic Monaghan, Elijah Wood, and Sean Bean all had the word ‘nine’ in Elvish on various parts of their body.

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