The Big Picture

Peter Jackson was selective in choosing the actor to play Frodo in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s audition was infamous for its poor performance. Gyllenhaal missed the mark by not understanding the significance of the One Ring and failing to do a proper accent for Frodo’s lines. Despite not getting the role, Gyllenhaal’s career thrived, and he has since become a successful actor in various films and franchises.

The road to making The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was a long and winding one. The casting process alone is a rich story filled with “what ifs” and “could have beens,” as iconic actors from Sean Connery to Nic Cage were almost considered for roles in Peter Jackson’s epic Tolkien adaptation. Jackson was particularly selective when choosing a Frodo, though. For the Hobbit protagonist, he wanted a young, relatively unknown, and preferably English actor. Nevertheless, Jackson still received audition tapes from actors around the world, including some would-be stars. One of them in particular came from a current Hollywood A-lister, who was still in the early stages of his career when he turned in an audition so notorious that it caused the director to facepalm.

Jake Gyllenhaal Recalls His Encounter With Peter Jackson
Image via Pandora Cinema

Back in the late ’90s, Jake Gyllenhaal was a young actor fresh off of playing the lead teenager in 1999’s October Sky. He recounts in an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon how around that time, his agents called him with excitement, telling him that New Line Cinema just green-lit Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and that the director was looking for actors to fill Middle Earth. Gyllenhaal reminisces with self-deprecating humor how his agents immediately thought he would make a perfect Hobbit.

Being just under twenty years old with a boyish face, small stature, and innocent blue eyes, Gyllenhaal did indeed look like a natural Frodo. However, the interview continues with Gyllenhaal explaining how we went in person to read for the part, and had to act out a scene before Peter Jackson. He describes the scene as having hardly any dialogue, but lots of stage directions — including Frodo picking up the One Ring. Perhaps unaware of the Ring’s significance in the narrative, Gyllenhaal performed the scene casually. In the Fallon interview, he reenacts his understated audition, pantomiming picking up the Ring with seeming indifference before asking Jackson how he did. Gyllenhaal then reenacts the director’s reaction of hanging his head in shame for the young actor and facepalming. In a roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter, Gyllenhaal revealed his camp heard it was “literally one of the worst auditions.”

RELATED: Here’s Why Quentin Tarantino Almost Replaced Peter Jackson on ‘The Lord of the Rings’

Dialogue Doesn’t Save Gyllenhaal’s Frodo
Image via Universal Pictures

Gyllenhaal claims that the scene’s lack of dialogue led him towards ignorance, as the script did not explain the Ring’s gravity. However, he also shares that when he did a subsequent scene with dialogue, he once again missed the mark to equally hilarious effect. He explains that he didn’t do an accent for Frodo’s lines, despite all of Middle Earth’s residents needing to sound English. Instead, the Southern California-raised actor played the part in his normal, American voice. Then, after Gyllenhaal explained to the director that nobody told him about the character’s accent, Jackson allegedly advised him to “fire his agent.” Gyllenhaal laughs about how he got defensive over being a Hobbit, and jokes that he had to be ushered out of the room.

The Fallon interview took place in 2016, and though Peter Jackson has not publicly commented on Gyllenhaal’s audition, the incident is referenced in Ian Nathan’s definitive behind-the-scenes book, Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle Earth. Thus, while it is possible that Gyllenhaal embellished or dramatized the hysterical situation in the interview, it seems there is truth to the story — after all, Gyllenhaal is not our Frodo.

Elijah Wood’s Unique Entrance Into Middle Earth
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

The part, of course, went to Elijah Wood, another rising American actor who was just a teen at the time. In an Esquire interview, Wood revealed that his audition was not without its own eccentricities. Like most actors, Wood did not audition in person, but sent a VHS tape to Jackson. He performed a scene wearing a wig and a makeshift Hobbit outfit and filmed the audition with his friends in a Los Angeles park, evoking the organic nature of Tolkien’s world. And yes… he put on a British accent.

All of this charmed Jackson. According to Nathan’s book, Jackson had only previously known Wood for his part in the campy 1996 dolphin movie, Flipper. Nevertheless, Wood’s stellar filmography, earnest acting skills, and intensely innocent looks led Jackson to deem the young American “the perfect Frodo.” After a couple of months of deliberation, Jackson gave Wood the callback that Gyllenhaal never got, simply asking from New Zealand, “I was wondering if you wanted to come down and play Frodo.” Of course, he did just that.

Jake Gyllenhaal and The Lord of the Rings Cast Made It There And Back Again
Image via Marvel Studios

Despite — or in some cases because of — all the twists and turns along the way, The Lord of the Rings’ casting ended up being close to perfect. Each actor has become the image of their character, and we can’t imagine anyone other than Ian McKellan, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Bean, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, John Rhys-Davies, Orlando Bloom, and Elijah Wood making up the Fellowship. The same could be said for Christopher Lee as Saruman, Andy Serkis as Gollum, Hugo Weaving as Elrond, and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, too.

Things did not fizzle out for Jake Gyllenhaal, either. While he never got to play a Hobbit, his career certainly accelerated during the 2000s. The same year that The Fellowship of the Ring premiered, Gyllenhaal received praise for playing the titular disturbed teenager in the surreal cult thriller, Donnie Darko. In 2004, he would leap into blockbuster territory in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow. Then, the following year, he turned in his first and only Oscar-nominated performance to date, portraying cowboy Jack Twist in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.

At the end of the decade, Gyllenhaal starred in David Fincher’s Zodiac, and throughout the 2010s, he was able to work with esteemed directors like Denis Villeneuve, Bong Joon-Ho, and more. He also leaped into the producer’s seat for Nightcrawler in 2014, which incidentally contained one of his best performances. Finally, although it wasn’t Lord of the Rings, he got the chance to make his mark on comic book fantasy movies by playing supervillain Mysterio in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Clearly, not playing Frodo hasn’t stifled Gyllenhaal’s success. Moreover, in the same Esquire interview where Elijah Wood recounts his audition story, he also pays deference to Gyllenhaal. He enthusiastically says that he’s not surprised Gyllenhaal was at the top of the shortlist to play Frodo, and describes his fellow actor as “incredible.” As evident in both Gyllenhaal and Wood’s contemporary interviews, each actor has found healthy amusement in the would-be casting. Given how great the Lord of the Rings movies wound up being, and all the wonderful performances Gyllenhaal has offered audiences elsewhere, we can happily laugh along with them.