Billy Boyd tells FanX crowd his ‘feet fell off’ while visiting dentist during ‘Lord of the Rings’ filming

SALT LAKE CITY ( ABC4 ) — The 2024 edition of FanX in downtown Salt Lake City kicked off with a bang as four of the stars from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy took to the largest stage at the convention.

Fans filled the Grand Ballroom of the Salt Palace Convention Center and welcomed three of the four hobbits — Elijah Wood (Frodo), Dominic Monaghan (Merry), Billy Boyd (Pippin) — and Gimli, played by John Rhys-Davies, to Salt Lake City with a deafening roar. The panel was originally also supposed to star Sean Astin (Sam) but he was unable to make it for the first day of the convention, allowing for Rhys-Davies to fill in.

Through the course of the question and answer panel, the “Lord of the Rings” stars revealed small details about their time with the movies, such as props they should not have taken home or lines that are repeated back to them by fans. Rhys-Davies also revealed Boyd was a “very, very, highly accomplished and recognized bookbinder” who was ready to take commissions. Meanwhile, Wood and Monaghan confessed to being asked about wigs “all the time” — a reference to a prank interview Monaghan conducted on Wood.

However, the afternoon’s best story came from Billy Boyd, who confessed to “his feet falling off” while visiting the dentist during the filming of “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

“It takes an hour to put the Hobbit feet on at that time,” explained Boyd. “You had to glue them and paint them and put hair on. And I was sitting in my trailer waiting to go on and I got a toothache. A really bad toothache.”

So what does Boyd do? He goes to the dentist. Dressed as a hobbit at a time when no one had seen a hobbit or even knew what it was. To keep the secrecy of the movie, the filmmakers put a robe over Boyd and covered his prosthetic feet with giant moon boots, he explained. When he got to the dentist, it was confirmed he would need a filling.

“And I was like, ‘I have lines to say this afternoon. I can’t numb my mouth.’ And she was like, ‘I could try and give you it without numbing, but it might be painful.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, give it a go,'” continued Boyd.

The crowd responded with a resounding painful “Oh” while Wood exclaimed with a shocked “What?!”

“Novacaine does go away in like an hour and a half,” Wood said, to which Boyd explained that he thought he would have to go back on set right after his trip to the dentist. Boyd continued telling the Salt Lake fans of the numb-less drilling as the dentist worked to give him a tooth filling while assuring her that he was alright.

“I was sweating so much that my feet fell off,” said Boyd.

“She drilled your feet off,” joked Wood.

Boyd said he left the dentist’s office carrying his “feet” back to the set where they had to go through the whole process of putting them back on. “When I knew I had to put them back on which by then the numbness would have went,” he concluded.

The “Lord of the Rings” star said it was “dreadful stuff,” joking that Viggo Mortensen’s — who stared as Aragorn in the trilogy — famed chipped tooth was “nothing” compared to his full filling with nothing to numb it.

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