I played an orc in all three Lord of the Ring movies. If you look really closely, I am the grayish one with the teeth coming out in all directions from my face. On your HD televisions, you can see 14 pixels of me charging at 1,763,925 pixels of Bilbo with a Styrofoam axe.
It wasn’t until the accident that I really made it big time. One day, my agent called me and told me, “Hey, I got you in another blockbuster film. Thor.” I told him I didn’t know there were orcs in that movie, but in the end I thought, who cared as long as there was steady work.
The good thing was I didn’t even need to change out of my makeup and costume from the set of Hobbit. After shooting Hobbit in New Zealand, I took the first flight to Reykjavik. Security wasn’t too happy seeing me but when I told them that I was an Icelandic reindeer herder, they finally agreed to let me on my flight, with the exception of my Styrofoam axe which had to be checked in.
When I arrived on the set of Thor, I went up to the director and asked him what sort of orc he needed: a fierce, athletic-type who would really be into football, a nerdy one with glasses running around with a scroll under his armpits, or just a no-nonsense orc, jostled about by the energy of the other orc actors around me. He looked at me for the longest period, blinking, just blinking; his cinematic brain pulsing with images of how he would put me on celluloid.
“Idiot,” he said. “There are no orcs in this movie. Just put on a helmet and fall down when Thor bashes you on the head.”
If I didn’t know better, I would’ve taken that as an insult, but having played in three major blockbuster movies, I knew it was a stroke of directorial brilliance. By belittling me in front of the whole cast and crew, he made me feel the loneliness and anger of my existential role as an orc.
I was not really sure exactly what species of orc-like aliens I was supposed to portray, so my acting instincts kicked in and I imagined myself as the last remaining orc in the entire universe, the whole race of my fellow orcs destroyed by this human man with hair that glimmered in the light. I, the last orc, would have to avenge the death of all my brethren even if it meant running crazily into his hammer face first.
Chris Hemsworth (or Prissy Chrissy I like to call him, since we’re pretty tight now) got me right under the chin. Unlike our Styrofoam axes we orcs carry, Chris’s hammer is actually made of solid iron. I went down like a sack of potatoes and whenever I replay that scene over and over and over and over in my head, a tear comes to my eye, knowing that I pleased moviegoers all over the world. I was bringing catharsis to the masses.
You see, I wasn’t just an orc. For the moviegoers, I was the rush hour traffic, the productivity quotas at work, and the nagging spouse who is always telling you to find a real job and who thinks being in the highest grossing movies of all time is ‘alright’ and says it in snarky way which really means that she is just jealous of your achievements and wishes she didn’t have a boring 9-5 job, chained to her desk, selling insurance. All of them squashed in a second of movie time. The broken teeth, the cracked jaw, the brain concussion, all of it were worth the bit of sunshine I brought to the world.
Now that my face is disfigured for life, all the big shot directors and their mothers are knocking at my door, hoping for me to star in their latest projects. Imagine all the savings in makeup alone. All I need now is a bit of powder and bang” I am out on set chomping on someone’s leg. I am even working on a contract with one huge mega director who wants to showcase me as the lead. The working title is Orc Man. It would feature the main character's poetry, like this one I wrote after I made my debut in Fellowship of the Ring:
Orcs, orcs are we just pork?
Do we not bleed, do we not fart?
A day will come when the Orcs will rule.
And conquer the world from all the fools.