Viggo Mortensen Showed Up to ‘Lord of the Rings’ Set With an ‘Eye Bulged Out’ After Surfing Accident, Could Only Be Filmed From the Side: ‘Black Eye, Shut, Like a Boxer Swollen’

For anyone attending the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy theatrical re-release, pay attention to the iconic Mines of Moria set piece in “The Fellowship of the Ring” and you may notice for the first time that Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn is only filmed from the side for much of the sequence. That’s because Mortensen got into a surfing accident in the middle of production and showed up to set with a bulging, swollen black eye.

“The thing with these movies, of course, is we shot all three of them at the same time and then in a mixed-up kind of way,” Jackson says in his video introduction to the “Fellowship” re-release (via Entertainment Weekly). “So one day we’d be shooting a bit from ‘The Fellowship,’ then that would be on Monday. On Tuesday, we’d shoot a scene from [second film] ‘The Two Towers,’ on Wednesday, back to Fellowship again,…