Orlando Bloom Thought ‘What Am I Doing Here?’ When Joining the Cast of Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings franchise was all about the journey, and for star Orlando Bloom, the filming process itself was a journey, too.

“For me, as a young actor, I remember sitting there coming out of drama school with all of these legends,” Bloom, 48, shared during a Lord of the Rings panel at Awesome Con in Washington, D.C., on April 6. “And thinking, ‘What am I doing here? How did this happen? This is unbelievable.’ ”

“It was a feeling of excitement,” he added of filming the first of the movies, which came out in 2001. “I mean, I was 20. We’d read the books and had a sort of understanding of what this could possibly be, but not really knowing anything because it was my first movie experience. I was just like an open vessel, and it’s about that sort of anticipation, that excitement, that sort of sense of possibility, that feeling that your whole life is beginning and you’re beginning this remarkable journey. If I could bottle that feeling and give it to you all… I think we also never could’ve known — I don’t think any of us really knew what we were stepping into.”

At the panel, Bloom — who played elf Legolas in the films — was joined by costars Liv Tyler, Sean Astin and Jonathan Rhys-Davies.

Tyler, 47, agreed that “the whole experience was so exciting and terrifying just to be a part of the whole world, the vastness of the material. I felt so much responsibility and I still do. I get nervous when I talk about it. There was just so much that we had to learn.”

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Her character, half-elven Arwen, she recalled, “is a beautiful character who’s a little bit mysterious because there’s not as much of her in the books. So we were sort of figuring out how to communicate into the films and create her story, which took a few turns over the years. I guess I’m still sort of in awe and inspired by her today,” she said. “We were so young. It was hard to fully understand everything as it was happening.”

With that, Rhys-Davies, 80, added, “And yet, it was not evident, even now, that you had, as you said, a certain sense of terror. The woman, the fierce character she plays, so beautiful, so assured, you would never imagine it was a young actress who was …”

“Scared to ride a horse?” Tyler asked. “I was very scared to ride a horse.”

“You didn’t see it,” Rhys-Davies, who played dwarf warrior Gimli, replied.

Tyler, Astin said, also brought a different energy to the set.

“When Liv first got there, we all had dinner. Remember, it had just been the boys for months, lots of locker room talk for months,” the 54-year-old, who played hobbit Samwise Gamgee, recalled. “And then Liv was coming, for dinner, and we were all, ‘I’ll sit next to her, no I’ll sit next to her!’ “