“[I met him] quite by chance, really,” he recalled in the interview. “I met him with a group of other people in a pub in Oxford he used to go to, The Eagle and Child. I was very much in awe of him, as you can imagine, so I just said, ‘How do you do?’” Lee was the only LOTR cast member to actually meet Tolkien, who passed away in 1973, before several of the film’s stars had been born.