[Kalimac]

Reg - to be honest, I think that that may be the best indicator yet that Astin's performance was excellent - the fact that it's possible to look at it and say "Well, of course he would be good - what other way would it have been possible for him to act?" He got into Sam's skin so well that it seemed like he was being carried along for the ride as much as the audience was, but that wasn't the case. <P>This was a very good acting job, especially considering the occasional awkwardness of the script, where lines like "I thought I'd lost you" and "Don't you leave him, Samwise Gamgee," or that Osgiliath speech (grr!) if not dreadful in themselves, could easily be made into very bad laughs by an actor who hammed it up or tried to play up the Sam the Simpleton aspect of the thing too much. Sam spends a lot of time, even in the books, as a sort of understated comic relief; his heroic and intelligent aspects don't really start blazing out until the end of TTT, but they are there in FOTR, just easy to miss at first glance because they're often so funny at the same time. If Astin had decided to go for pure bumbling laughs at the beginning, Sam's transformation post-Fellowship-breakup would have been very hard to believe, or worse yet it may never have happened (imagine a comic pratfall on Sauron's Road. Yes, it could have been that bad). <P>Just my $0.02 - hope it makes sense.