David Bowie Was Almost Gandalf or Elrond in 'Lord of the Rings' 

Some new and obscure stories about David Bowie are surfacing in the wake of the iconic musician’s passing. One time, Coldplay approached him for a collaboration and Bowie told them to bugger off. Now, actor Dominic Monaghan is recalling a chance encounter with Bowie — while he was auditioning for Lord of the Rings.

“I’m assuming he read for Gandalf,” recalls Monaghan, who starred in Peter Jackson’s cinematic trilogy as Meriadoc Brandybuck. He told The Huffington Post “I can’t think of anything else he would’ve read for. He may have read for something else, but I’m a huge David Bowie fan, and I was lucky enough to know his son now so just seeing him in person was pretty special to me.”

Monaghan’s spotty memory runs opposite of a popular rumor that Bowie had auditioned for Elrond, which went to Australian actor Hugo Weaving. Either way, it’s not hard to imagine Bowie playing a tall white wizard.

The future star of the classic video game Quantum Break detailed only a little of what happened when he saw Bowie. “I was at the Hubbard’s, which is a pretty notorious casting agency office in London, doing an audition for Lord of the Rings … and I sat in the reception office. As I was reading a magazine waiting, David Bowie came in and signed his little list and went in.”

It’s not clear why Peter Jackson ultimately passed on having David Bowie in his award-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, given how well he would have fit in with its aesthetics.

Then again, maybe it was Bowie who had passed; If the timelines are correct, Bowie was working on his 22nd album Heathen.

Worth it.