Lord of the Rings actor Dominic Monaghan is preparing for superstardom

by Rob Haynes

Having downed his soft drink Dominic Monaghan effusively bids farewell to the middle-aged barmaids, who coo maternally in the manner of mothers after a favoured child. Nursing their dinnertime pints, no one else in the quiet south Manchester pub pays a great deal of attention.

It is a mild late summer afternoon. As anonymous as he is now, in a few brief months this young man will be battling dragons and trolls as the hobbit Merry in The Fellowship of the Ring -- the first installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, possibly the only film capable of distracting attention from the Harry Potter celluloid juggernaut.

The star process has already begun cranking into gear when I meet him, not long since returned from the promotional grind of the Cannes film festival.

"An interview every 12 minutes for five days," he tells me, a little glassily.

By any standards, the film is a major project. Taken from the legendary JRR Tolkien novels -- the second most read books in the world after the Bible, according to some -- the first two books had been previously adapted in 1978 as a mostly unremembered animated Ralph Bakshi feature (now, unsurprisingly, re-released). The new version has been produced on an epic scale to match that of Tolkien's original vision.

New Zealand director Peter Jackson, previously best known for [unintelligible] excursion Bad Taste, took the unprecedented step of filming the entire film trilogy in one long shoot, with a cast of -- literally -- thousands and a £300m budget.

Quite a change of career for Monaghan, a young actor whose previous high point was as Patricia Routledge's teenage assistant in the pensionable detective series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.

At 5ft 6ins, Monaghan is the tallest hobbit in the cast. Tanned and toned, young and back-packer good-looking, he was born to English parents in Germany, but has his roots in Manchester.

The 25-year-old (his birthday is December 8) has lived an itinerant existence -- after leaving school he lived and worked in Germany, France and London.

"I've never been comfortable staying in one place for any amount of time," he states, shifting in his seat at the thought. "I get very edgy."

After four series in Hetty, Monaghan's itchy feet were ready for a new challenge but even he couldn't have been prepared for what happened next.

"I started doing theatre, then I did a programme with John Thaw [Monsignor Renard], and I thought, 'This is quite cool.' Then, bang! Lord of the Rings!"

His recruitment was simple and painless -- casting directors watched him in a play in London, had a chat, and the role was offered. Monaghan, then living in France, heard the news from his agent, who told him to pack up and get ready to move to New Zealand. It didn't take long before the scale of the enterprise became apparent to him.

"When I arrived I walked around this workshop which had been working on Lord of the Rings material for seven years," he recalls, still a little dazed. "I met a guy who's spent four years making chain-mail by hand."

"Then I started to get my head around the ideas people had for the movie -- the DVD, the toys, the key-rings, the tie-ins... and it's terrifying," he confesses. "But I do my job, and everything else is up to other people. I just strapped myself in and went with it."

Far from the usual two or three months, shooting the [unintelligible] took two years out of his life.

"Well the nine boys who made up the Fellowship were all over there [New Zealand] for 17 months, working six days a week," he explains with pride. "We did the first day's filming, we did the last day's filming. The last day, everyone was crying their eyes out, it was so sad that it had all ended."

The large, impressive cast -- including Elijah Wood, Sir Ian McKellen and Liv Tyler -- helped the lengthy process along, and Monaghan name-drops with ease.

"Billy [Boyd, who plays fellow hobbit Pippin] and I got on well with Sean [Bean, as the warrior Boromir]," he says enthusiastically. We were northern guys, used to northern humor, winding each other up."

"Ian Holm [Bilbo Baggins] was amazing, just stunning to watch. We'd be do stuff on studio A and I'd creep into Studio B at lunchtime just to watch him, because he never does the same take twice. Days like that were great. Just walking past Christopher Lee [Sauron, the chief wizard] is amazing because he's 6ft 4ins, breaks the record for doing the most amount of movies, and he's the most incredible storyteller -- he'll talk to you about Erroll Flynn, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, all these people, he doesn't mind. So I would just sit with him if I was bored."

Of course, one of the drawbacks with the devotion afforded to stars of fantasy series is the very role which made an actor famous can become impossible to escape -- just ask Leonard Nimoy who felt moved to entitle his autobiography I Am Not Spock.

"Yeah, but until now I've always had the same questions anyway," he shrugs. "You'll always be known for something -- people are very keen on labelling other people. But, for the rest of my career, if I'm always associated with this movie, it's no bad thing -- it's an amazing piece of work."

With the remaining two installments due to be released at yearly intervals, Monaghan will be a part of cinema-going consciousness for some time to come. Should superstardom result, he is as prepared for the peculiarities of fame as it is possible to be.

"It's like a pitbull," he ponders enigmatically. "You try and understand it, you try and get your head around this beast, but sooner or later it's going to turn round and bite you on the arse. I think you have to realise that and try to prepare for it. I'm just a tiny cog in this huge, sprawling beast of an industry. All I want to do is work. I love acting -- the fact that I get paid is a blessing."

Inside Story

-- First found fame... Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996)

-- Linked to... Bilbo Baggins, and the Ring.

-- Once said... Of his hobbit costume: "I did get to keep a pair of feet -- which wasn't allowed, but fuck 'em. It wasn't fair that they should just get shredded."