Sir Ian Holm Waiting for Hobbit Callback

It seems that at one point, Peter Jackson considered bringing back Sir Ian Holm to reprise his role of Bilbo Baggins (older version) for The Hobbit films. In an interview with The Telegraph, the actor talks about how he is waiting for the call from production asking him to return.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” the 79-year-old actor admitted to me at the Saatchi Gallery. “I haven’t heard anything for weeks.”

Sir Ian had been in talks with the film’s producers about reprising his role as Bilbo Baggins, which he had played in the first and the third of the Lord of the Rings films, and in many newspapers and countless websites it is reported as a fact that he is included in the cast of the latest of Jackson’s J R R Tolkien’s adaptations to be made in New Zealand.

“I had great fun playing Baggins in the first two films and the plan had been, with Martin Freeman playing Young Baggins, I would be the Old Baggins,” he adds. “I suppose the earthquake in Christchurch couldn’t have helped with communications.”

Sophie de Stempel, Sir Ian’s wife, tells me: “I worry that the film has run into so much bad luck that they might have missed their chance altogether.”

I suspect that Elijah Wood coming back as Frodo nixed Holm's return. The rumors are that Frodo will provide a bridge of sorts for the films by the movies being him reading "There and Back Again" that Bilbo wrote (as seen in the beginning and end of the trilogy).