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Lord of the Rings star visits MIT tourism students
18 October 2012
The Witch King, Gothmog and Lurtz. Lawrence Makoare is best known for his iconic roles in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
On the eve of the release of The Hobbit, Mr Makoare visited Manukau Institute of Technology students to talk to Diploma in Pacific Rim Tourism students about the film industry and tourism in New Zealand.
He shared stories from the three years he spent filming the trilogy, which brought an estimated $700million to the New Zealand economy.
Meeting famous movie stars and travelling internationally on promotional tours were the glamorous upside of Mr Makoare’s job.
However, it wasn’t all that way. While preparing for the scene where Lurtz, the Uruk-Hai warrior, is born in the first film, Mr Makoare spent 11 hours in makeup. It then took a further four hours to remove when he had finished filming.
Preparing for the Witch King scenes in The Return of the King took less time – around 20 minutes to don the costume – however, filming in the summer was incredibly uncomfortable under cumbersome head and body armour.
As orc commander Gothmog makeup took close to five hours. During filming breaks assistants had to mop up pools of sweat as the mask was glued on and there was nowhere for it to run.
While Mr Makoare was heavily made up for his various roles in the films, he is still well recognised by Lord of the Rings fans.
He will be using this connection with fans in his new role as a tour guide for Middle Earth tours, which will use actors from the films to guide tourists around the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit hotspots.
Mr Makoare told the MIT students he hopes for another tourism wave on the back of The Hobbit, and now is a good time for them to be entering the industry.
Contact: Andrea Svendsen
Phone: 09 968 8755
