Hordes of Orcs descend upon the Fellowship in the Mines of Moria. (Photo by Pierre Vinet for New Line Cinema. All Lord of the Rings images courtesy of New Line Cinema.)

…that the textures in film scripts get thinner and thinner, if they exist at all. There's very little resonance in writing.

When I started my career, there were still writers around who had worked on the stage and read plays and read books and actually came from that sort of background. They had (sometimes) a theatricality, but they also had a sense of theater. I find that less and less.

I find immense technical competence. Take a film that I hate -- American Beauty. I hate everything in that play. It's brilliantly directed. It's pretty damn well scripted. It's wonderfully acted. I hate it with a complete passion. It seems to me false in every way that a story can be false. The only couple who are really happy in their marriage are the two gay guys. This doesn't fit the gay couples I know, who are endlessly, seriously fighting, and are frequently very mean and very nasty towards each other.

The American Marine colonel is not only a homophobe, but he clearly knocks his women around and hurts people. Not only that, but he's secretly gay himself. He just doesn't want to recognize it. Again, the American men I've known who have been gay seem to have a pretty firm grasp of the fact and what it means. And I haven't met very many of those, I have to tell you.

The kid who's the drug dealer, he's going to be all right. Not in my experience. The little West Indian kid that I remember babysitting actually died of an overdose of heroin two weeks before he was scheduled to go before the court on a charge of dealing heroin.

John Rhys-Davies at Dragoncon 2001

All the values seem to be wrong, and because of that, I wouldn't have given it Best Picture. I loved the acting. I thought it was superb. And that was really one of the best pictures of that year. But what happened to The Patriot? Did they even include The Patriot in the running, for God's sake? We all got very pissy in England, because once again it was the Brits being the bad guys.

Crescent Blues: But that gets you a lot of work.

John Rhys-Davies: Well. Yeah.

Crescent Blues: The scope of your background and reading is immense. Tonight the conversation's gone from Stone Age burials to space cadets. Do you ever find that the breadth of your background interferes with your pleasure in acting a script?

John Rhys-Davies: There are one or two scripts that are so blatantly wrong -- generally, in terms of class. Americans have no idea of class or status in earlier societies. They regard "Hey, we're all equals here" as self-evident in every society and try to insert that into the convicts of the Irish Famine or something like this. What you end up with is a contemporary little fable that allegedly is set in the past. It has no real depth or power or resonance. Yes, that does irritate me sometimes. Then, on the other hand, sometimes you see things and go: "Wow. I didn't know that." Then you go off and read something about China -- of whose history we know nothing, for God's sake.

Elven wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) guides the Hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood) through the perilous caverns of Middle Earth in The Fellowship of the Ring. (Photo by Pierre Vinet for New Line Cinema)

I did a wonderful series called Archaeology on The Learning Channel, and it gave me a splendid overview of history. It was like a grand crib of world history. It left me with some very unfashionable views. Oh God, if I open my mouth now, I'll be condemned forever. I ended up, actually, sort of agreeing with the Inquisition.

Crescent Blues: [Yelps.] No!

John Rhys-Davies: I agreed that the gods and demons of Meso- and Central America were devils. I think [Aztec society] was the most monstrous and vicious and cruel and sadistic society. I wholly understand why those Dominicans came and looked around and thought, "These people are in hell. They've got to be delivered from hell." Because it was hell.

Crescent Blues: However, I do argue with the Inquisition going after "lapsed" former Jews and Moslems, confiscating their property and, in many cases, their lives.

John Rhys-Davies: Well, of course. Moving Islam out of Europe was a pretty important thing to do, but the dispersal of the Jews was a radical and awful thing.

But you have such a polarization of faith. There are two problems we're going to face in this century. One is coming to terms with the emerging great power of China and doing so amicably and peacefully. Actually, I'm pretty sure it can be done. The second is how we come to terms with Islam, and I do not know that we have an answer for that.

Crescent Blues: Extremists are the problem.

John Rhys-Davies: And perhaps the only way you can counter extremism. In the siege of Montrieux in 1570, the Muslim forces captured one of the outer castillians and caught three Knights of Malta, crucified them and floated the crosses into the harbor at Valletta on the tide. And the response of the Grandmaster [of the Knights of Malta] was to behead three thousand Muslim prisoners and fire their heads back in cannons to the enemy. The only way you come to terms with absolute extremism is by becoming more fanatical yourself. The knock-on effect is that the whole world becomes warped with that fanaticism. But if you do not… Remember, Roland of Ronceveaux and Charlemagne are guys who stopped a very violent and convulsive transformation of Europe.

Crescent Blues: Do you direct, and is that an area you'd like to explore?

John Rhys-Davies: I've done a bit. And I've done a bit of writing, but not enough. In truth, I would just love to be able to take six months a year and do what I originally set out to do. I didn't really want to become an actor.

Crescent Blues: What did you want to do?

John Rhys-Davies: I wanted to be a writer.

Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) celebrates his birthday with his Hobbit friends in The Fellowship of the Ring. (Photo by Pierre Vinet for New Line Cinema)

Crescent Blues: Then how did you become an actor?

John Rhys-Davies: I figured I could earn my keep as an actor, and we all know all actors spend at least half the year out of work. So, I learned my craft as an actor, figuring that I'd practice it and write in the six months of the year I was out of work.

I had seven weeks off work in the first five years and made the discovery that, market forces being what they are (and there being a scarcity of large, ugly old men with loud voices) I could work. That and laziness.

One of the evil effects of the guy that taught me philosophy was that when I did read my own stuff, it was completely banal. You could use it for nothing. It drove me almost to the point of nervous breakdown. In the end, I could not write a sentence that had meaning. What do you mean that men have been writing about the drama of Ibsen? What is drama, to begin with? It is the immaturity of the inferior mind that troubles itself about questions that are way to big for it to be troubling itself with.

Crescent Blues: Like "What is success?" Forcing your audience to answer that was evil. That was downright evil.

John Rhys-Davies: What makes a success? There must be a list of ingredients that you could actually look down and say, "All right, being in the right time…"

Crescent Blues: Being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right communication skills, and having a hell of a lot of luck.

John Rhys-Davies: That's a pretty good recension. I may give you an uncredited quote on that one.

Ian McKellen as Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring. (Photo by Pierre Vinet for New Line Cinema)

Crescent Blues: I'd be enchanted if you actually chose to quote it. I have no doubt you will remember this interview at least as well as the tape recorder. Do you attribute your ability with accents to your -- I would almost say "bipolar childhood," but it involved three places…

John Rhys-Davies: Tri-polar…

Crescent Blues: Is such a thing possible -- tri-polar?

John Rhys-Davies: "Schizophrenic" is probably the word you're looking for there. It's baffling, because children like that never really settle in and are never really comfortable, anymore, in any of those particular niches. You are always slightly an outsider, and that's a wonderful thing, because being an outsider, you can observe.

That is so true of so many actors of my generation, particularly the ones that grew up in the colonies. Mostly majors' daughters, by the way. Actually, that was the case with that glorious actress, Julie Christie. (I saw her, once, in the flesh. It was the only time in my life where my throat has gone dry; she was so beautiful.) So many actors and actresses of that generation came from a different background and never really fit into the society that existed in England or, in fact, outside of it. Therefore, they made huge efforts to imitate and work their way into society by being entertainers.

Crescent Blues: Be charming, and they will take you in.

John Rhys-Davies: That's right.

Crescent Blues: Considering how critical the English are of Americans doing English or Scottish or Irish accents, you're working a tough crowd when you do a Scottish accent at home. Was it ever a problem?

John Rhys-Davies: Oh yes, of course. Sometimes when I'm really good, and I put the effort in on it, I'm quite good at it, but I've gotten very lazy with accents. But Americans tend to be better at accents than, I think, a lot of English. When I saw This Is Spinal Tap, I said to the person I was with, "These guys are English." And she said, "No, they're not. They're Americans." I said, "Listen, I will give up acting if these guys are Americans. No American can be that good." Americans can, to my chagrin, I discovered.

Crescent Blues: Two questions left. The first one is, what do you want to do with the next two-thirds of your life?

John Rhys-Davies: Do a bit of serious writing, and being able to afford being a bit more choosy. Not to be quite so totally foolish in my grand investments. They generally come to no good. To avoid con men. This largely consists of people whose last name is "Morgan." I have encountered two Morgans who were not up to any good -- and another one who was absolutely wonderful.

Crescent Blues: The descendants of Morgan le Fay, perhaps.

John Rhys-Davies: The Glamorgan were the sea people. You can't trust them. It goes back to the sixth century. Perhaps before then.

Crescent Blues: Bad geography is an American trait. Where is Glamorgan?

John Rhys-Davies: [In deep Welsh accent.] Glamorgan? God, it's a little bit of the Holy Land itself, where the language of God is spoken. Wales. Of course "wealas" is an Anglo-Saxon word for "foreigner." The Welsh were actually the Cymbri or "the Folk" in their own terms. After the Romans went back to Rome in 410, there came a relatively peaceful period, then the Wales and the Saxons moved in and pushed the Britons right out of the central lands into the marsh areas. North Wales at that time was actually the area called Northumbria. West Wales was Cornwall.

But it's not the people of Glamorgan. Just the Morgans.

Crescent Blues: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

John Rhys-Davies: Do not take advantage of a man who's talked all day, largely nonsense, frequently designed to provoke a response and get people thinking. Please, do not treat it as if I regard my pontifications as Holy Writ. There are so many finer minds than mine. And what a crazy world that it is that anyone would listen to any actor. Thank you for your enormous patience.

Jean Marie Ward and Teri Smith

Click here to learn more about John Rhys-Davies and The One Ring, episode one of Lord of the Rings.