Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is returning to our screens for the highly-anticipated second season, and HELLO! caught up with one of the show's stars, Peter Mullan, about his filming experience—and how taking an item home as a keepsake nearly landed him in big trouble!
Chatting on the red carpet at the Rings of Power premiere, Peter revealed that he did indeed take some of his prosthetics home with him as a keepsake while portraying the Dwarf King Durin III, joking: "Am I going to get somebody fired? It wasn't expensive!"
However, his cheeky keepsake almost landed him in trouble at the airport when his bag was flagged as he went through security. He explained: "They had to look through my bag. As he was doing it, I was thinking, 'I don't have anything,' then I remembered certain parts of my anatomy!
"You'd think he'd go, 'Okay, I need to phone the police now because you've chopped somebody up,' but he just [shrugged and] went through the other stuff."
Although he kept some parts of his costume, Peter admitted that it was certainly a difficult one to wear.
"[It was] brutal," he explained. "As an actor, when you say something is brutal, you follow it up with, 'But it's not like I was working down a mine.' In this gig, I was working down a mine! That was a lesson for me… I'm doing it with 19 hours' worth of prosthetics and the big baggy costume, and just when it's as bad as it can get and you're suffocating under it, they put a seven-foot-long horsehair beard right there. Any air vents left are gone. They put a dead horse on you."
The Scottish actor, who has also starred in Westworld and Ozark, joked: "Do you worry about airports? Do you worry about the state of humankind? Why would someone not be bothered about very realistic parts of human anatomy in a bag?! I'd be worried!"
Speaking about what to expect from his character in season two, he explained: "My guy becomes a junkie! He ruins everything for everybody. He becomes very bitter and twisted and nasty, and has a terrible fallout with his son, which leads to all-out war in Dwarf-land."
Rings of Power season two will land on Prime Video from 29 August.