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David Bowie almost played Gandalf in Lord Of The Rings

By | Published on Tuesday 20 December 2016

David Bowie

David Bowie wasn’t in the ‘Lord Of The Rings’ films. We all know that. But he might have been. He just wasn’t.

Right, so, it’s been a rumour for a while now that Bowie was lined up to play Gandalf in the film series, a role which instead went to Ian McKellan. Back in January, Dominic Monaghan, who played Merry in the films, recalled to the Huffington Post: “I was at the Hubbard’s, which is a pretty notorious casting agency office in London, doing an audition for ‘Lord Of The Rings’. As I was reading a magazine waiting, David Bowie came in and signed his little list and went in. And I’m assuming he read for Gandalf. I can’t think of anything else he would’ve read for”.

Actually, he apparently wanted to play elf king Elrond (I guess having already played the goblin king Jareth in ‘Labyrinth’, it would have been nice to go for the set). It was Peter Jackson who thought he would be better suited to Galdalf.

We know this, because casting director Amy Hubbard has now been speaking to the Huffington Post, and she has cleared up the whole mystery. Why didn’t he play either role? Was his audition terrible? Was there are fight? Oh, the drama!

“He was unavailable”, explained Hubbard, disappointingly. “It was a very quick conversation with the legendary Chris Andrews at CAA. I do believe that [Bowie] went over and played for everybody at the Millennium party. That would’ve been New Year’s Eve in the year 1999, which was when the films were being shot. He went over and entertained everybody, but he never auditioned. That’s for sure”.

Back in 1999, of course, Bowie was working on his soundtrack for videogame ‘Omikron: The Nomad Soul’, in which he also appeared as a character. So, yeah, there’s that.



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