Lord of the Rings actors on how infamous "meat's back on the menu" line came about (2025)

Lord of the Rings fans have kept the movie saga alive for almost two decades after its end, making memes out of almost every scene of the over 11-hour-long fantasy epic (in the extended cut that is, obviously).

One of the most iconic and bizarre lines besides "one does not simply walk into Mordor" and "cast it into the fire...destroy it," has to be "looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!"

Spoken by Ugluk, the Uruk-hai leader of the orcs in the second film, The Two Towers, it comes in a scene after hobbits Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) have been captured as they are believed to be the ones carrying the Ring.

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An orc named Snaga suggests eating the hobbits and is backed by one of his comrades Grishnakh, who suggests maiming them after Ugluk forbids them from touching the hobbits since they are too valuable and need to be delivered to Saruman alive.

But when Snaga sneaks too close to the pair, Ugluk swiftly cut him in half with his sword and screams that iconic line before the other Uruk-hai tear him apart and devour him.

What has confounded fans about this scene, though, is how in the hell an Uruk-hai orc leader would even know to use the word menu in this situation.

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Explaining to Thrillist the origin behind this very out of place sounding line, Nathaniel Lees, who played Ugluk and uttered it, said: "Firstly, Ugluk was Uruk-hai and considered himself and his troops above the orcs.

"'Menu' is merely the choice of food available. Once I had beheaded the orc [Snaga], 'meat was back on the menu.'"

Stephen Ure, who portrayed Grishnakh had more insight about how the line came to be: "There's a lot of stuff that doesn't really make sense. Of course they wouldn't know what a menu was.

"You're not going to start debating the writing, because maybe then they are going to run away and rewrite it and then you are going to be sitting there in all that stuff [the costumes and make-up]. Really, at the end of the day, you just want it to be over and get out of that stuff."

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The actor continued explaining he didn't even know of the scene's infamous status before the interview and added: "There's a lot of clunky things in there. It's [screenwriter] Philippa Boyens. She puts all this stuff in there that doesn't make sense.

"She was taken on board because she was the Tolkien expert. I can tell the lines that Philippa wrote. Like in the third film where I'm playing Gorbag, and when I finally come up from the big orc fight that starts over the Mithril vest, and I'm going to kill Elijah [Wood as Frodo], and say, 'I'm going to bleed you like a stuck pig.'"

Apparently though, the Lord of the Rings memes didn't quite reach the cast since Jed Brophy, who gets decapitated as Snaga, also wasn't aware of this line becoming so famous: "There is that modern vernacular that slips into [the script.] I never thought about that until you mentioned it."

The Lord of the Rings TV series will air on Amazon Prime Video, with no confirmed release date yet.

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