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It goes without saying that the human citizens of Middle-Earth busted their asses to make the greatest movie trilogy of all time (fact, not opinion), but the horses cast in The Lord of the Rings had a lot to do too. Take, for example, everything that had to be accomplished by Uraeus, who played Aragorn's horse Brego in most of the films.

"He had to do a lot of scenes in the trilogy;," Argorn actor Viggo Mortensen recently said during a career retrospective, "he had to do some difficult things. Lying down, letting me get on him - for a big horse like that he had to do some difficult things." But what makes the work especially impressive is the fact that Uraeus didn't even have the prep time his equestrian fellows did. According to Mortensen, the horse was brought in only a week before filming one of the biggest scenes in the trilogy - the Battle at Helm's Deep. 

We learned all this from a panel Mortensen recently did at the Glasgow Film Festival 2024, where, unsurprisingly for the actor's fans, the Crimes of the Future actor spent a great deal of time talking about horses. In particular, he talked about how the LOTR horses had to be trained "for all the noise and the shouting and the swords and axes banging on shields." 

"Plus," added the actor, "The cameras and the lights; it's very unsettling for horses. So there were months of preparation with the horses riding through cloths and things, and people making a racket and banging things and waving things, shiny things and loud things and so on, until the actors could work with them safely and do the shots or stand still while all this was going on and not back away."

"With the horse that I was working with," he continued, "Which looked exactly like like Uraeus, I worked for months preparing and did the thing where he has to pick me up and all those things. And because they're dressage horses, I had to fight, you know, I had one hand on the reins and one hand on the sword. Often it was difficult to train those horses to [...] be able to guide them just with your knees and make them turn. They just wouldn't because they weren't trained that way. So all those things you had to do."

But you know what they say - Man Plans, Sauron Laughs. And all that training, Mortensen would learn, would be for naught.

"Just maybe a week or so [...] before we had to shoot a scene in Helms Deep," said The Prophecy actor, "I think it was the first scene I had to do with the horse, all these Orcs are attacking and screaming and stuff. And there was a shakeup in the horse department. The people in charge of the horse Department were sent away [...] and unfortunately, they only owned one horse; which was [mine]."

"They took it and so they were like, 'Well, we have another one that looks just like yours. He's a champion equestrian horse who won many ribbons and is wonderful.' And I got on him I was like oh my God. I didn't know what his buttons were and I was like, 'Holy shit.'"

Mortensen explained that, with a serious timecrunch hovering over them both, he didn't know how the scenes with his new costar would come together.

"At first," he said, "it was really hard to get him - he's very strong - to get him to do the things I needed to do. Our first scene was disastrous. It was all these people shouting. [Uraeus] wanted to kill the other horses; he wanted to kill every human being. I did not have spurs,  but I had a sword, and so I would whack him with the flat of the sword just to keep him in the shot, because he would keep backing up and rearing. It was hard for him and it was hard for everyone. And I thought, wow, this is going to be really hard, this movie."

Of course, even casual fans of the Lord of the RIngs movie trilogy know that the filming did come together. And spectacularly, at that - I'll remind you that one of the scenes in question is the famous "Look to the east" moment, when Théoden and Aragorn ride out against the hosts of Isengard and find reinforcements from Gandalf waiting for them. 

But what casual viewers may not know is that, after successfully completing filming together, Mortensen purchased Uraeus for himself. 

"[Uraeus] is very smart," Mortensen concluded, "And we worked hard every spare second that we had. He ended up being incredible, and he did all the things, and then some, that the other horses had learned to do."

I guess "and then some," in this case, means "becoming a lifelong friend."

Whether you're Shirefolk, Elven, Dwarven, or something else, there's a good reason to love Lord of the Rings. We do! With that in mind, we have a dragon's horde of goodies for you from a Lord of the Rings reading guide, a Lord of the Rings watch guide, details on the upcoming animated film Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim, a full the Lord of the Rings reunion panel you can watch, how the OG Hobbit actors stay in touch every day on a groupchat, and the true message of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, according to Gimli himself - John Rhys-Davies.