We've already told you that an animated movie based on The Lord of the Rings is in the works, called The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Now, one of the voice actors has been announced - and it's somewhat surprisingly Christopher Lee.
Lee played many iconic and often evil characters during his long life, each time with impressive results, be it Dracula, Francisco Scaramanga (the villain in The Man with the Golden Gun) or Count Dooku (Star Wars films Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith). But... he is of course best known as Saruman, the treacherous wizard in The Lord of the Rings.
But Lee sadly died in 2015, so is this an AI impersonation thing waiting for us? No, it turns out that the studio talked to Lee's estate and got permission to use footage from The Hobbit that never made it into the movies. Producer Philippa Boyens had this to say about it to TheOneRing (transcribed by ScreenRant):
"When we reached out to Gitte, Lady Lee, who's sadly no longer with us... she said the thing that I think Peter [Jackson] felt in his heart, which was that Sir Christopher would have wanted this. And so we went into his records, I got to go back and hear his voice, not just doing the lines, but talking to us as we were recording them. And we based it on a line from The Hobbit, which is 'Are you in need of assistance, my lady?' A version of that line.
And we thought, okay that's a line, we can see how many takes he did of that. Can we use it? Can we find a new read on it and change it up a little bit. And our brilliant guys did that. But it is an authentic bit of Christopher Lee performance that it's based on."
Boyens seems to have been surprised herself that there was so much usable discarded material, and was ready to let another actor take on the role of Saruman. Now it will be the real deal we get to hear one last time - and we readily admit that this little detail alone makes us extra eager to see The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which opens in theatres in December.