Elijah Wood and The Lord of the Rings cast recently reunited, proving you can always journey back to the Shire.
“The band’s all here,” Sean Astin wrote via Instagram on Saturday, August 8, snapping a selfie from a recent gathering with Wood, 45, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan.
Monaghan, 49, shared another image from the cast’s low-key reunion, revealing the group dined at La Royal in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Four Halflings. Three cocktails. Two desserts. ONE great night of conversation. More to come,” Monaghan teased of the evening. “#becurious shoutout to the couple [photobombing] in the back. Well played. Thank you @laroyal_cambridge.”
Wood, Astin, 55, Boyd, 57, and Monaghan starred in the big-screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic Lord of the Rings franchise. The first movie, which premiered in 2001, followed hobbit Frodo Baggins (Wood) on a journey to destroy the One Ring to help save Middle-earth from the evil powers of Dark Lord Sauron.
In the years since wrapping the LOTR series, Wood has largely stepped back from the limelight to enjoy a more private family life. (Wood and his longtime partner, Mette-Marie Kongsved, are parents of two.)
“We’re well out of toddlerville and they’ve entered kid-dom. It’s incredible,” Wood told The Times of London in a March profile, noting his children have yet to watch his LOTR work. “They have not, but only because I genuinely don’t think they’re old enough. I feel like it might be appropriate when they are 8.”
Wood previously revealed that he loved how “all-consuming” fatherhood had become.
“The silver lining of the pandemic has been that it’s enabled me to enjoy fatherhood in a way I might not have done,” he told The Guardian in 2021. “My son was born seven or eight months before lockdown, so we’ve had this kind of unbelievable, uninterrupted family time that we’re probably never going to have again.”
Wood also recently stepped back into acting, joining Samara Weaving’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come horror movie.
“I think of it as an action movie with comedic elements. Yes, it does have trappings of a horror. There are literally exploding bodies,” Wood noted to The Times earlier this year of his latest project. “But, the reason that horror never goes away is that, as a society, we always have something to be afraid of in real life, but horror is a safe way to experience fear because nothing’s actually going to happen. It’s cathartic.”
