The Lord of the Rings actor Stephen Ure has weighed in on The Two Towers' "Meat’s back on the menu" scene, revealing he's surprised to learn it's famous. Though the Lord of the Rings books came out in the 1950s, the franchise remains immensely popular to this day. Many are especially fond of Peter Jackson's movies, which began with The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. The Two Towers followed in 2002, with The Return of the King completing the trilogy in 2003. The franchise lived on in the Hobbit series, also directed by Jackson. A Lord of the Rings TV series is also currently in the works for Amazon Prime Video.
The original film trilogy features a number of iconic scenes, one of which takes place in The Two Towers. At one point, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are captured by a group of orcs, including Ugluk (Nathaniel Lees), Grishnakh (Ure), and Snaga (Jed Brophy). The orcs debate killing Merry and Pippin or at least injuring them for food. When Snaga gets a little too eager, Ugluk decapitates him instead. He then utters the now-famous line, "Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!"
Ure, Lees, and Brophy recently sat down with Thrillist to discuss the Lord of the Rings scene, as well as the reaction to it. For his part, Ure is baffled the scene has become so well-known, even criticizing the "clunky" dialogue:
There's a lot of stuff that doesn't really make sense. Of course they wouldn't know what a menu was. You're not going to start debating the writing, because maybe then they are going to run away and rewrite it and then you are going to be sitting there in all that stuff. Really, at the end of the day, you just want it to be over and get out of that stuff. I had no idea that this scene had become so famous. There's a lot of clunky things in there. It's Philippa Boyens. She puts all this stuff in there that doesn't make sense. She was taken on board because she was the Tolkien expert. I can tell the lines that Philippa wrote. Like in the third film where I'm playing Gorbag, and when I finally come up from the big orc fight that starts over the Mithril vest, and I'm going to kill Elijah [Wood as Frodo], and say, "I'm going to bleed you like a stuck pig."
Ure makes a fair point about the line sticking out a bit in the Lord of the Rings movies. However, the scene wouldn't be as famous as it is without it. It's the kind of line that's instantly quotable, both due to the Lord of the Rings popularity and how memorable the line is. In that way, one could argue it was the right call to include it, even if Ure believes it doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the film.
The Lord of the Rings scene is also evidence of how impossible it is to predict which moments in a movie or TV show audiences will respond to. For example, the writers of WandaVision likely had no idea Vision's "What is grief, if not love persevering?" quote would become something viewers were both deeply moved by and couldn't help but turn into a meme. At a certain point, it may be best to just enjoy the fact audiences are talking about a project or specific moment at all, even if it seems surprising, like in the case of the Lord of the Rings scene.
Source: Thrillist