THORIN OAKENSHIELD: Richard Armitage - couldn't imagine watching another actor play this role.
With 13 dwarfs in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, audiences are expected by the film trilogy's end to easily distinguish and recognise each one.
But if there's one dwarf that will be easy to spot from the moment he appears on screen it will be Thorin Oakenshield, played by British actor Richard Armitage.
One reason is that Thorin is the leader and, going on a glimpse I got of the band of dwarfs on set during filming earlier this year, a heroic risk-taker. I couldn't help but think that Thorin could be to The Hobbit what Aragorn – played by Viggo Mortensen – was in The Lord of the Rings.
Armitage, 41, laughs. It isn't the first time he's performed in The Hobbit. He was cast in a school production but the part wasn't so heroic. "I was playing an elf. I was running around in circles being an elf in a forest and we had a papier mache dragon and a man off stage with a funny microphone for Gollum.
"So it was pretty much like the movie we've just made," he jokes.
Armitage, who is doing the interview while in New York at the height of Hurricane Sandy – "I haven't got any power or water but I've got a phone line" – is best known to Kiwis for his risk-taking heroic roles in television's Spooks and Strike Back. He's done a small number of movies, including a part in Captain America: The First Avenger.
But The Hobbit is likely to have Armitage exposed to the biggest audience of his career. As yet, he hasn't dwelled much on what life will be like after the first film is released.
But he says he's optimistic that he won't be recognised often when out in public, due to the prosthetics and makeup used to transform him into Thorin. "Because 60 per cent of Thorin's face belongs to Weta [Workshop], I might get away with it. People might recognise my chin.
"I haven't really thought about it. At the moment I just want people to really enjoy the film and enjoy the character. If that means they want to come up and say, 'Hi' then that's good. They might want to throw tomatoes at me in the street – but fair enough."
READ MORE: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/7985809/Richard-Armitage-the-warrior-dwarf
No comments:
Post a Comment