Viggo Mortensen has confirmed that the horses he rode on during the filming of Lord of the Rings, as well as two others from the films, have passed away. Mortensen played Aragorn in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and after filming, he had become attached to the horses used for certain battle scenes, and decided to purchase a couple of them. Mortensen bought two different horses that his character had rode on during the films, a Chestnut horse and a Bay horse, as well as the white horse ridden by Arwen during Fellowship of the Ring.
During an interview the actor also confirmed that he had given the white horse to the stuntwoman who played Arwen in that scene. "The person who did that spectacular bit of riding was a stuntwoman who I ended up becoming friends with. I knew how much she liked that horse, so I bought it for her." Sadly he then went on to confirm that while the white horse was still alive, his two horses had passed away in the time since. "That one is still around, but the other two have passed away. They were of a certain age already when we shooting and that’s 20 years ago now.”
The interview wasn't all somber, however, as the actor reflected on shooting the films, and in particular one scene that had never been released. “There was a scene that we shot as a sort of memory flashback. It was from the courtship days when he first met Arwen – and we shot it just before we were taking a break so I was clean-shaven and prettied up. They’d tried to make me look as young as possible. I had different hair and I was dressed like an elf... It was a beautiful sequence but obviously it wasn’t needed for the movie. I’ve never seen it but I enjoyed shooting that scene. It’d be nice to see it actually, it’s not in the extended editions either.”
While the passing of the horses is a sad piece of news, at the very least their memory will be preserved in one of most famous series of films ever made. All things considered, it's a pretty impressive legacy that any other horse would be jealous of.
The Lord of the Rings movies are available now.
Source: NME