How did they make The Lord of the Rings? Aragorn's most famous scream wasn't acting

Peter Jackson shot The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King as one enormous production in New Zealand. Principal photography ran 438 days, from October 11, 1999, to December 22, 2000, with seven units working at once. The three films came out a year apart, starting in December 2001, and the scream in question arrives early in the second one.

The Aragorn who almost wasn't

Mortensen wasn't Jackson's first Aragorn. During the first month of filming, Stuart Townsend was deemed too young for the part, and Mortensen replaced him within three days, just in time to shoot the Weathertop sequence.

He nearly said no. The person who talked him into it was his son Henry, then 11 and a Tolkien fan.

"He said, 'Dad, you should do that,'" Mortensen told CBS in 2016.

Mortensen hesitated: "And I was explaining, 'Well, it'll take a long time. I'm not really ready.'" Henry's answer: "You'll figure it out. You should do it. It could be good."

He figured it out fast, and he did it physically. Bob Anderson, the swordmaster who trained the cast, called him "the best swordsman I've ever trained" in the extended-edition extras. Mortensen did as much of his own fighting as he could, which meant his body took the hits.

The scene

In The Two Towers, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli chase the Uruk-hai who carried off Merry and Pippin, and arrive too late. The Riders of Rohan have already slaughtered the orcs and burned the bodies. Aragorn assumes the hobbits are somewhere in the smoking pile. He kicks an orc helmet, lets out a scream, and drops to his knees.

Jackson wanted the helmet to fly toward the camera, so Mortensen kept kicking it, take after take. On the fifth take he got the distance and broke two toes.

The scream that follows is not Aragorn grieving. It's Mortensen's foot. He stayed in character anyway, finished the moment on his knees, and Jackson put that take in the movie.

"Normally, an actor would yell 'Ow!' if they hurt themselves," Jackson said.

His summary of what happened instead: "Viggo turned a broken toe into a performance."

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The toes weren't the only casualty

The production treated Mortensen's face no more gently than his feet. Elijah Wood remembered him "getting half of his tooth knocked out during a fight sequence." What impressed Wood more was the fix: "his insistence on applying superglue to put it back in."

And one injury changed how a whole sequence was filmed. In an introduction recorded for the trilogy's theatrical re-release, Jackson told Entertainment Weekly that Mortensen once arrived for the Mines of Moria shoot after a weekend surfing with the hobbits. The board had flipped up and hit him in the face.

"Black eye, shut, like a boxer swollen," Jackson recalled.

Mortensen apologized. Jackson's solution: "all I could do is to shoot him from the side." Watch the Fellowship cave troll fight and you'll notice Aragorn is only ever shown in profile.

Previously we wrote: Why was Wicked split into two movies? One song made a single film impossible