Lord of the Rings start Elijah Wood says that the face of one of the nasty orcs seen in the film was based on the equally grotesque Harvey Weinstein. Apparently during the period that Lord of the Rings was in development at Miramax, Weinstein was a bully to director Peter Jackson, attempting to control how the films would be made and threatening to fire him. Eventually, Jackson struck a deal with New Line Cinema to make the films he wanted to make. And that included having one of the orcs' faces modeled on Weinstein. Here's Wood speaking on the Armchair Expert podcast:
"It's funny, this was recently spoken about because Dom [Monaghan] and Bill [Boyd, who played Hobbits Merry and Pippin in the trilogy] have a podcast, The Friendship Onion. They were talking to Sean Astin [who played Samwise] about his first memory of getting to New Zealand. He had seen these orc masks. And one of the orc masks—and I remember this vividly—was designed to look like Harvey Weinstein as a sort of a fuck you.
"I think that is OK to talk about now, the guy is fucking incarcerated. Fuck him."
