There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale

This book isn’t for fans of the film at all, it’s a vehicle for Astin to muse about his life as an actor. My first point against the publishers would therefore be the misleading tagline the book receives: “An Actor’s Tale - A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Lord of the Rings”. There is barely half the book devoted to specifically LOTR material and it’s hugely disappointing.

Although disappointed by the lack of LOTR insights, I expected the rest of the book to be an entertaining view of Astin’s acting life. Sadly this isn’t the case: Astin is a whiner. Barely a page goes by without him complaining about some aspect of his career, whether it be critical indifference to his performances, his monetary worth, or the chip on his shoulder about never having really made the “big time” as he puts it (until LOTR at least).

It’s clear from musings about his early career that Astin suffers from low self-esteem, self-doubt and crushing under confidence in his own abilities. This of course is nothing new for many actors. He badly wants the recognition of his peers and seems desperate for it even when it’s negative. Yet bizarrely his writing becomes inconsistent when he later shows extreme over-confidence in his “heroic” portrayal of Sam or his annoyance that he couldn’t influence the production of LOTR more. At one point he remarks how Christopher Lee was crestfallen when Saruman was entirely cut from the third film: “Sometimes brutal decisions have to made”, yet when his own scenes were lightly trimmed he throws a fit and screams to his wife “They’ve ruined it!” It’s this self-absorbed nonsense that makes the book a tiresome read.

There is a degree of honesty about the problems Astin has faced and his descriptions of how he dealt with these issues. He has written erudite reasoning for his behaviour and many pages are devoted to analyzing himself and then trying to improve: a commendable trait and one that could be respected if you could believe it. But Astin has had far too long to think this stuff through and the cynic in me believes that his “self-improvement” thoughts were not experienced at the time as written, but only while he was actually writing his book several years later.

Beyond Astin’s self-confessed propensity for melodrama and a lot of personal background that I really didn’t want to know, his writing style is a mess. The book constantly jumps around between anecdotes of his early career right in the middle of an account of something on the LOTR set. It’s jarring, annoying and doesn’t respect the reader. When we finally do get some interesting information about the film production, it’s usually focused on some aspect that Astin wasn’t happy with.

It’s not all bad. Some of the anecdotes are almost amusing and I do think the friendships he describes with Elijah Wood and Christopher Lee were genuine as far as Astin saw them, but again the cynic can’t help but notice that the only people Astin seems to respect are those who are “successful” in the movies - he doesn’t seem to ever hang around anyone in the industry whom he feels is lesser than him.

I didn’t enjoy this book. I found the whole experience tiring and dull. I learned little about the LOTR films (the main reason I bought it) and more about Astin than I care to know.

I finished it feeling that although Astin is a decent actor with some good work behind him, he simply cannot get over himself long enough to recognize his accomplishments and enjoy them.