Dominic Monaghan was best known for the TV show "Hetty Wainthropp Investigates", but since his prominent role in ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Rings’ he is known to millions as Merry, a mischievous Hobbit and friend to Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) . Before he got his first TV role, he was studying English Literature, Drama and Geography at Sixth Form College. The “Hetty Wainthropp…” show which he was offered the co-starring role in ran for four years.

His other television credits include "This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper" and a leading role in “Monsignor Renard”, also starring John Thaw.

On the stage, Monaghan has performed in the world premiere UK production of The Resurrectionists, Whale and Annie and Fanny from Bolton to Rome, but since watching ‘Star Wars’ when he was six years old, Dominic has been consumed by films.

Born and raised in Berlin, Monaghan and his family moved to England when he was twelve. In addition to speaking fluent German, he has a knack at impersonations and accents. He frequently returns to Manchester to see his family (and of course Man United).

His other obsessions include writing, music, fashion, playing/watching football and surfing. Utilizing his writing skills, he and ‘LOTR’ co-star Billy Boyd are collaborating on a script.

With the second installment of ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ out soon, I phoned Dominic at his latest base of operations in LA, to talk about the movies, his life so far and how he is coping with stardom.

Dominic: Hi I was just in my Garden, watching the Humming birds – I’ve got a feeder, so they come to it like nectar.

Clayton: Sounds idyllic.

Dominic: Ah, it’s beautiful.

Clayton: I haven’t seen a cut of the new film, have you seen it yet?

Dominic: Yeah, I saw it on Sunday.

Clayton: …and?

Dominic: It’s good man! It’s really good, and everyone gets a chance to go on with their stories cos we’re all separated.

Clayton: How did you get involved with LOTR, and the part of Merry?

Dominic: I was in a job in France, and my agent called me up and just said there were open auditions of ‘Lord Of The Rings’, and did I want to do it – and I was like “f**k yeah”. I came back and it was like five or six meeting later and I got the part.

Clayton: Before ‘The Lord Of The Rings’, your credits were mainly in TV, and although you were known in this country, how much has appearing in such a high profile film series changed your life?

Dominic: In everyway really. Before LOTR I was living in England and now I’m living in America. I think this is the industry that I really wanted to work in more than anything. Film and theatre is really what I wanna do.

Clayton: More than TV?

Dominic: Yeah, More than TV cos it appeals to more people, more people see it. And of course theatre is the place where you can hone your skills.

Clayton: I know that Christopher Lee is a huge fan of LOTR, and apparently he re-reads it every year.

Dominic: Yeah, every summer.

Clayton: Were you a fan of LOTR before you got the part?

Dominic: Yeah, my dad’s a big reader of the books, and a couple of his friends, you know that generation who read it religiously. He gave me a copy of the book when I was fourteen, and I read it when I was fifteen. When we were kids, we would travel to England in our car, from Germany, and listen to storybook tapes and one of them was the Hobbit. So we were aware of Bilbo and Gandalf and all that kind of stuff.

Clayton: Talking of Christopher Lee, how did you get on with the rest of the cast, and how did it feel to be working with stars such as Christopher Lee & Ian McKellen?

Dominic: Yeah, really good. Everyone got on really well; there were no sort of egos, no-one who was “The Boss”. Everyone took as much s**t as everyone else. Everyone got the p**s taken out of them every so often. It was a nice little gang type feeling.

Clayton: The filming was done in New Zealand, had you ever been there before you went for LOTR?

Dominic: No, and I don’t even know if I would have gone. I kinda thought it was going to be like Australia.

Clayton: What were your impressions of the place?

Dominic: It’s one of the best places I’ve ever been to. It’s great for us because they speak our language and the English pound is so strong there. But it’s just a great country, there are lots of young people there and it’s really artistic. Everybody loves the outdoors, surfing and bungee-jumping.

Clayton: Did you partake in all those things?

Dominic: Oh yeah. We all got into surfing, and we did some bungee-jumping.

Clayton: Most of the crew were native to NZ, but did you and the other actors get the opportunity to "step back" from work and appreciate the wonderful landscape you were working in?

Dominic: We had a little bit of a break, you know, enough to go down to Queenstown and do all this snowboarding and have some fun and stuff.

Clayton: You were over there for quite a long time.

Dominic: Just over a year and a half, yeah.

Clayton: Which is quite a long time to take out for one project.

Dominic: Sure is.

Clayton: During the mountain scenes, were there any "hairy" / risky moments? How much of that was CGI?

Dominic: Most of that was CGI’d. We filmed some shots in Queenstown where we got buried in the snow and stuff like that. But most of the stuff we were doing was CGI’d generally.

Clayton: So, no risk to the cast?

Dominic: No, I mean the main kind of danger we got into was the fight scenes. There’s so much going on.

Clayton: How did you find working on those sorts of action sequences?

Dominic: Loved it! We had like a nine week training programme. All we did was learn to swordfight. Go to the gym and get stronger, kayak and all that sort of stuff. It was just so much fun. For a group of young lads to get that opportunity. We dived in with both feet.

Clayton: Talking of CGI, there are an awful lot of effects shots in the films. How did you find working with things that just weren’t there?

Dominic: It’s alright, it’s just part of the technique, and you know when you’re working on a movie like this you just have to… Being an actor’s about imagination and you have to keep extending your imagination. It wasn’t too much of a hurdle to get over.

Clayton: In the long shots, they replaced the Hobbits with small people, but in the action sequences and other scenes when you interact with the other cast members, how did they get the effect of your differing sizes?

Dominic: Well sometimes we’d be down on our knees, or they’d put Ian McKellen up on boxes or Orlando up on boxes. And one of the key things about the book is that it’s mentioned, but it’s not a huge part of their personality. The Hobbits don’t think that they’re small; they think that everyone else is abnormally tall.

Clayton: For the role of Merry you had to wear a foam fat suit & drink 3 litres of water a day so you wouldn’t dehydrate. Was it all worth it?

Dominic: Yeah, but I used to take off that fat suit at the end of the day, and it just stank. It smelled so bad, because it was like a second skin. Ahh man, it was f*****g horrible…But I think it was worth it. In the first movie, Merry’s kinda fat, and in the second movie he’s losing a little bit and in the third movie he’s thin, and he does his own thing – he gets on horses and does a lot of sword-fighting. He becomes more of a warrior so… I think it works.

Clayton: There is a quote from you that I read about not missing having to stand for two hours at 4:30 am, having glue in your ears and freezing cold glue applied to your feet. How much of a make up process did you have to go through to become a Hobbit?

Dominic: I went through three to three and a half hours a day, which would be putting on your wigs, and then your ears, then a little bit of make-up, then feet, which would be about an hour and a half – I had to get into feet everyday. Loads of work and loads of hot, sticky glue. At five in the morning, you’re getting these feet stuck to you. It was fun and games, but it was good because it gave you a chance to read the book and look over the script and get into each other’s music.

Clayton: I heard that Jackson got everyone to listen to the BBC radio adaptation before production started. Is that true?

Dominic: I’m sure he probably recommended it. It’s the one where Ian Holm plays Frodo, yeah I’m sure he recommended it to us – but we didn’t have to listen to it, it wasn’t essential.

Clayton: How much direction did Peter Jackson give you in order to get you inside the character?

Dominic: Well, I think he knew that we kinda had our head around the whole Hobbit thing. We knew what our characters were. The main direction that Pete gave us was “Keep it real”. Because Hobbits have this tendency to feel emotions on a really high level. He’d ask us to keep it as Hobbity as possible. If they wanna cry, they cry. If they’re happy they laugh, not like humans who can hide their emotions. It was good.

Clayton: What preparation did you do yourself?

Dominic: I just read the book over and over again. I read diaries that I’d written when I was about nineteen, cos I thought Merry was more like me when I was younger – he just rolls with this sort of angst, and he needs to prove himself. I felt a little bit more like that when I was like eighteen or nineteen. I just read what I was up to at that age.

Clayton: Do you think the character Tom Bombadil should have been included in the LOTR film, as he seems to be by far one of the most talked about characters in Tolkien's works and a lot of fans were disappointed in his exclusion. Or will he make a cameo somewhere else?

Dominic: I think that with the movie, what happened was, the movie needs to keep moving forwards, and when it’s not moving forwards its kinda gets redundant. And with Tom Bombadil, he keeps the Hobbits in his house for a month or two and talks to them about the world and how they can’t change it and that’s the way it’s going to be. And for a movie, it’s just playing the same beat over and over again. So it was excluded to keep the movie moving forward and I don’t think he’s gonna make a cameo elsewhere. But you’ll have to ask Pete (Jackson) that question.

Clayton: When Twentieth Century Fox was making both the remake and the original POTA’s film, there was a natural gathering of the various species, Gorillas talking with other Gorillas, Chimps with Chimps etc. Did you find that sort of thing happening on the LOTR set?

Dominic: Oh certainly. All the Orc guys sat and had lunch together. The good guys all had lunch together. Hobbits tended to hang out all the time.

Clayton: Had you met the other guys?

Dominic: No I hadn’t met any of them.

Clayton: But you became like a gang?

Dominic: Yeah, you know it was a Fellowship. We were a group by the end of it, you had to be, you worked so closely. But yeah, we’d all hang out together. We still do you know. I live in LA where Elijah lives, and Orlando lives, and Viggo lives. Everyone’s always passing through here. We just recently all hung out with each other on Sunday to see the movie. But me and Elijah, we hang out about once a week.

Clayton: Did he hear about the online petition that was started in the US to get the name of the second film changed from ‘The Two Towers’ because it was direct exploitation of the September 11th tragedies? Did you have any thoughts about that?

Dominic: Yeah, that was a shame. I guess we’re living in a pretty sensitive world and there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s an issue, but the book was written a long-time before the tragedy and it would be a bit silly to call it something else. But you have to appreciate the sensitivity for that subject.

Clayton: I read that since you saw ‘Star Wars’ when you were six years old, you have been consumed by films. How does it feel to be part of a film series that rivals SW in popularity?

Dominic: It’s one of those questions that I find really difficult to answer because I have no real concept of that sort of thing. When you’re right in the centre of a thing, you don’t really know. Its cool man, it’s really amazing to be noticed. But you only really get that impression when I talk to people like yourself, or the fans. It’s just a great job, I want people to like it but I don’t know how successful it is on any grand scale apart from the box office. Hopefully it will hold up for as long as Star Wars has.

Clayton: Going back to the work you did before LOTR, you were at a Sixth Form College when you were offered the co-starring role in the series "Hetty Wainthropp Investigates", how did that come about?

Dominic: I did a play in Manchester for the Manchester Youth Theatre and I got an agent through that, and there were open auditions in Manchester for this part and I thought “what have I got to lose?”, so I went down, and I think I went for five or six more auditions. I went to London met the director, did some improvising and they offered me the part.

Clayton: What sort of acting had you done before that?

Dominic: Theatre, amateur theatre. That was it really. No TV, no film. I was the class clown so I was used to performing and fooling around in front of my friends. I had a little too much confidence for my age. I thought I was the dogs b******s. That probably helped me with the auditions.

Clayton: Were you able to work and to continue studying at the same time?

Dominic: I kinda did it for the first series, and then it just got too hard because there was too much time taken up with it. I always intended going back to college, but I just kept on working

Clayton: You were born in Germany, you lived in England and you spent a long time filming in NZ. You’re now based in LA. How long has that been for?

Dominic: About a year now.

Clayton: So directly after the first film?

Dominic: Yeah, pretty much.

Clayton: Do you still get to see Man United play much?

Dominic: I’m actually going back this Christmas to see United play. I’m going to go and watch them on the 3rd or 4th of January with a couple of friends that I’m bringing over from America to see real football. It’s great, you’re in a bar and you say “I’m playing football tomorrow” and it’s like (fake American accent) “You mean Soccer? Or real football, American football?” And I’ll go into a tirade “You guys don’t play football; you play catch, rugby for girls”. Yeah then I get myself in trouble. I’ve always travelled, as a kid my parents moved me around, a different place in Germany every four years. But I got the travel bug when I was a kid, living in different countries, and going into this industry is great cos I get to travel so much.

Clayton: What is the most extravagant thing you have bought since your success?

Dominic: I just bought a car over here. An old 1989 BMW convertible. I bought it off Sean Astin, the guy who plays Sam in the movie. He was selling it and he said “Do you want it?” Sure buddy…gimme a good price for it.

Clayton: Do you have a Merry action figure and if so where do you keep him?

Dominic: Yes. But my mum has it. I don’t know where she keeps it though.

Clayton: How does it feel to see yourself reproduced in miniature, in plastic?

Dominic: It’s kind of freaky. I gave them to my cousins who are really young. I think it would be a bit egocentric to have one hanging around your house. But it’s fun, it’s interesting - I’ve yet to see any money out of it.

Clayton: The merchandising has been pretty extensive – there’s just about everything with LOTR on it available – do they have to pay you for your likeness?

Dominic: I think so, at some point. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Clayton: But one day you’ll get a huge Cheque?
D; Well, I don’t know how huge it’ll be. A couple of hundred pounds from Romania… I honestly don’t know how it works, but as it stands at the moment we’ve not heard anything about that.

Clayton: One of my colleagues, Sarah Hartley wants to know if you have Orlando Bloom's phone number! But seriously you said that you’ve stayed in contact with many of the cast members…

Dominic: I’m seeing him tomorrow, so I’ll pass on her love to him – you know he’s gay right? No I’m just kidding!

Clayton: I believe that you’re collaborating on a script with your LOTR co-star Billy Boyd (Pippin), how is that going?

Dominic: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting that you said that because we just finished the third draft of this thing when we were down in Mexico surfing, and we drove back up and we’re talking a about the film. We’ll probably be close to having people look at it by the end of the year hopefully. It’s kind of a comedy vehicle for Billy and I because you get frustrated in this industry waiting for something to come about that you really want to do so you end up having to do it yourself. So it’s a comedy vehicle following two young guys who set up a scuba diving school in Miami.
It’s really good man, it’s got some really funny sequences in it. So hopefully someone will pick it up, and we’ll make it.

Clayton: Is writing something you’d like to concentrate on at the same time as acting?

Dominic: Certainly! I don’t see any kind of censorship – just cos I’m an actor, there’s a lot of other stuff that I really like to do. Definitely writing and things like that.

Clayton: What about directing?

Dominic: I don’t know about directing, certainly not at my age and I’ve never been that turned on by it as of yet. I may be in the future – but writings my big gig and that’s what I’m concentrating on. And producing – it’s all about power, right?

Clayton: I realize that there is another year in which you will probably have to do some more filming before ‘The Return Of The King’ is released –

Dominic: A little maybe.

Clayton: - but have you got any other projects in the pipeline?

Dominic: Well I’ve been kind of waiting there’s been a lot of stuff thrown around that I’ve been reading. But I’ve just been kind of waiting for the right thing. There’s stuff that I’ve gone for that hasn’t worked out that I’ve wanted and other things that have fallen through and stuff. I’m in this position where I can afford to wait, I’m lucky enough to be financially secure to not have to do anything that’s thrown at me. You know the next couple of jobs are going to be pretty crucial in terms of how you’re perceived by people. So I’m just waiting.

Clayton: Have you any plans to return to the stage?

Dominic: Yeah, I wanted to do a play in London, Billy and I looked into doing an adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, somewhere in London but I think there’s something like two or three productions of it going on this year, so we bagged on that one. But we’re speaking to a few theatres in London, and other regional theatres, to see if we can do a tour with a two hander next year.

Clayton: Is Liv Tyler as gorgeous in real life as she appears on screen?

Dominic: She sure is. She makes you come over a bit weak and I know her! And have you heard her speak? She’s got this real sweet way of speaking very kind of feminine, high pitched. She’s very cute, very adorable.

Clayton: I read that apart from acting and writing, you are also fanatical about music. Who are your favourite artists?

Dominic: That’s a terrible question; it’s like asking a chef what his favourite food is.

Clayton: What was the last album you bought?

Dominic: The last album I bought was the "Sigur Ros" album, but I don’t know if that’ll mean anything to you? And I bought the new Coldplay album. I’m a big fan of Coldplay.

Clayton: Did you get to meet Liv’s boyfriend who’s in the band “Spacehog”?

Dominic: Oh yeah I did, Roy. Yeah we hung out in Japan for a while. Yeah he’s really cool man; I like a lot of his music. Yeah I like any genre. Maybe heavy metal is the last kind of section I’d go to in HMV, but there’s still AC-DC and Ozzy Osbourne.

Clayton: Have you watched “The Osbournes”?

Dominic: Yeah, Yeah. I got to hang out with Jackie and Kelly quite a few times down in LA. They might be coming to see the premiere in LA. I saw jack at the cinema and he was really keen to come and see it, so we swapped numbers.

Clayton: So what’s LA life like?

Dominic: It’s good, it’s kind of cruisey. Hot weather so it makes life kind of slow. I’ve got a friend who’s got a pool so we tend to get all our jobs done early morning and head up to the pool and just hang out. I don’t tend to go out too much on the scene. Just hang out at people’s houses and maybe listen to music, play board games.

Clayton: Are you doing many interviews today?

Dominic: A couple, yeah.

Clayton: So the publicity machine has really started moving?

Dominic: This big beast is rolling on.

Clayton: I don’t know if you remember Steve Coogan’s character Alan Partridge, but in the recent promo clips for his new series he’s seen back at Radio Norwich asking this question of a listener – In your opinion, who is the best Lord? Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Dance or Lord of the Flies? Have you got an answer?

Dominic: Well It’s gotta be Lord Of The Rings. I must say though that is such a compliment, obviously Steve Coogan’s seen LOTR, and for me I think he’s the new Peter Sellers, and I hope that he starts getting involved with a vehicle in America that really makes him a huge big star. There was ’24 Hour Party People’ and ‘The Parole Officer’, but neither did much in the states. But all his TV has been so good, he’ll get there it’ll just be a little bit longer – he’s from Manchester you know! Genius.

Clayton: Well thanks for taking the time to talk to us -

Dominic: Pleasure!

Clayton: -And I look forward to seeing ‘The Two Towers’.

Dominic: Yeah, me too man, me too – I’ve seen it once, but I can’t wait to see it again.