Earlier this week on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Colbert was joined by actors Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, still best known for playing Merry and Pippin in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Monaghan and Boyd have started a podcast recounting their time on the old set, which was ostensibly their reason to show up on Colbert. However, if you know anything about Colbert, you know he’s an enormous Tolkien nerd, so our Hobbit heroes couldn’t help but test their host’s Middle-Earth meddle with some trivia. And as you’ll see, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The conversation is absolutely charming, with all three contestants (and a surprise fourth) clearly having an absolute ball. Monaghan and Boyd know Colbert’s reputation well and prepared accordingly, with advanced questions well beyond the scope of any casual’s knowledge. But Colbert is no casual, and this makes for a genuinely tense contest to rival Bilbo’s game of riddles with Gollum in the depths below the Misty Mountains.
