Christopher Lee returns to Lord of the Rings in War of the Rohirrim
Lee returns as Saruman in upcoming movie, and there was no need for AI this time
Christopher Lee died in 2015 after working as an actor across seven decades. But we’ll hear him once again in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, due in December.
This isn’t, for once, a depressing tale of tech bros attempting to capitalise on the voice talents of icons with AI, though.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’s team dug into the voice archives from Lee’s earlier roles in the LoTR and Hobbit films to piece together a performance for what sounds like a small part in the new film.
“We went into his records, I got to go back and hear his voice. Not just doing the lines, but talking to us as we were recording him,” Phillipa Boyens, War of the Rohirrim writer, told fan channel The One Ring.
“We based it on a line from The Hobbit, which is, ‘Are you in need of assistance, my lady?’ A version of that line, and we thought, okay, that’s a line we can see how many takes he did of that. Can we use it? Can we find a new read on it and change it up a little bit? And our brilliant guys did that. But it is an authentic bit of Christoper Lee performance that it’s based on that line.”
Middle Earth lore
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is set 180-250 years before the events of the classic trilogy. It’s the tale of Helm Hammerhand, the fabled king of Rohan, as he leads his forces into a battle that helps form the Middle-Earth we’ve known for decades.
How can Saruman be around hundreds of years earlier? That’s nothing for Saurman the White, according to Lord of the Rings lore. He’s an ancient being with at least a couple of thousand years clocked up by the time Frodo leaves the shire.
Brian Cox stars as Helm Hammerhead in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film is directed by Kenji Kamiyama, a Japanese master of animation who worked on 1988’s Akira and, more recently, Netflix’s Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim will arrive in cinemas on December 13.