“It looked a lot worse than it actually was.”Įven when they weren’t becoming blood balloons, those facial prosthetics were a lot to endure. So the blood built up and built up under the mask until, eventually, an eye bag which was glued on actually ruptured, and the blood just started spurting out,” he recalls. Because I was wearing a prosthetic mask, the blood couldn’t get out.
While holding one of the heavier, more detailed prop axes for a close-up shot of Gimli running, Beattie attempted to toss the weapon from one hand to the other. “The surgeon was asking me how I got those injuries, and I was like, ‘Well, I was battling Uruk-hai at Helm’s Deep,’” Beattie says, as he lists off other close calls like a sinking canoe, dodging horse hooves, and taking an ax to the head. Just last month, Beattie got his third knee reconstruction surgery, a consequence of having blown both knees while filming the movies. His time on set was not without incident. Beattie says he spent 189 days - some 2,300 hours - as Gimli, all told.īeattie, photographed rehearsing Gimli’s infamous “tossing” on set at Helm’s Deep.
He recalls watching a YouTube video of a minute and a half of Gimli fight scenes, and realizing that all but four seconds of the montage were him. Viewers can’t really tell when Gimli is Rhys-Davies and when he’s Beattie - that’s the whole point - but Beattie can. “I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubbles, but I can only think of a couple of shots where CGI was used to shrink Rhys-Davies down.” “I am aware that a lot of the people, even hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, assume that a lot of the shots are some tricky sort of camera angle or some CGI shrinking John Rhys-Davies down,” Beattie says with a good-natured laugh. But once it became clear that the facial prosthetics needed to bring Gimli to life triggered a nasty allergy in Rhys-Davies’ skin, Beattie became the go-to Gimli. (“I did that for two weeks and out of everything I’ve done, my god, that was dangerous.”) However, casting soon picked him up because he was an able scale double and could stand in for Rhys-Davies - who, despite playing a dwarf, was the tallest member of the main cast at 6-foot-1. Initially, Beattie was hired to do horse stunts. I couldn’t have gotten kicked more in the deep end, let’s put it that way.” I come from a rural environment,” Beattie tells Polygon.
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What he did have going for him, however, was a black belt in martial arts, plenty of horse-riding experience, and a height of 4-foot-10 - helpful for a movie where many main characters are dwarves or hobbits.
Although he had done “a wee bit” of high school drama while growing up in Canterbury, on New Zealand’s South Island, he had no serious acting experience to speak of.
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Stunt double and size double Brett Beattie has never spoken to the media about his time playing Gimli in the Lord of the Rings films until now, but in his own humble way, he’s ready to share the full extent of how much he put into the role, recall some old battle wounds, and reveal why he was chosen to become a member of the tattoo fellowship.īeattie was about as green as they come when he stepped into the blockbuster world of Middle-earth. Another actor spent a great deal of time playing Gimli alongside the other actors of the Fellowship, albeit without much credit. Since bringing Gimli the dwarf to life, Rhys-Davies has joked that he doesn’t have the tattoo because “whenever there’s anything dangerous or that involves blood, I sent my stunt double to do it.” But the true story is much more complicated and impressive.
So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.