Elijah Wood and Sean Astin have a hobbity reunion at the SAG Awards
Published on December 13, 2025 EDT Twenty years after "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" won big, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee reunited on stage.

Two of the Shire’s favorite hobbits reunited at the 2024 SAG Awards.

It’s been 20 years since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won big at the SAG Awards, taking home the top trophy for Best Cast in a Motion Picture. To celebrate, original stars Elijah Wood and Sean Astin reunited at the 2024 ceremony to present the award for Best Female Actor in a Supporting Role.

Wood wasn’t in attendance two decades ago when the LOTR team won, so as he walked on stage, he turned to Astin and joked, “Wait a second, we won? Sean, you were supposed to collect my statue for me if we won. What happened to it?”

A sheepish Astin admitted that he’d recently cleaned out his house, inspired by Marie Kondo. “It’s somewhere,” Astin finally admitted. “If by somewhere you mean FrodoFan711’s shelf because he bought it on eBay.” (So much for “I made a promise, Mister Frodo.”)

Besides, Astin continued, Wood doesn’t really need another trophy anyway: “Just throw it in the fire,” he joked.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Wood and Astin starred as Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee in all three of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. The third and final film, 2003’s Return of the King, swept the 2024 awards season, winning all of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for. Not only did ROTK tie Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most Oscars ever won by a single film, but it also set a standing record for the cleanest sweep in Academy Awards history.

Last year, Warner Bros. announced plans to make new Lord of the Rings films, set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved Middle-earth. At the time, Wood said he was “surprised” but hopeful that the new films would treat Tolkien’s world with a similar passion.

"Obviously, at the core of that is a desire to make a lot of money. It's not that a bunch of executives are like, 'Let's make really awesome art,'" Wood said in 2023. "And, again, not begrudging anybody because, of course, it is commerce. But great art can come from commerce. So those two things are not mutually exclusive."

He continued, "But [Jackson's] Lord of the Rings didn't come out of that place. It came out of a passion for these books and wanting to see them realized. And I hope that that is ultimately what will drive everything forward with whatever these subsequent movies are. I just hope that it's the same motivating factor at its core, whenever they hire a screenwriter and a filmmaker — that it is with reverence for Tolkien's material and enthusiasm to explore it."

The 2024 SAG Awards are airing live Saturday night from the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Hall in Los Angeles. Check out the full list of winners.

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