Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Smaug and Necromancer in The Hobbit, has been talking to The Telegraph about the filming of Smaug.
Describing Smaug as ‘a 400-year-old fire-breathing worm who lives in the middle of a mountain on top of a pile of gold, who is three or four times bigger than the Empire State Building and can fly,’ Benedict said the filming involved working against a green screen and wearing a motion-capture suit of the kind used to film Gollum.
‘It’s sort of a grey all-in-one jumpsuit, with a skullcap, a Madonna headset and Aboriginal-like face paint,’ he explained. ‘You feel like a tit in all that gear but Peter is so lovely you soon forget.’
Benedict worked with director Peter Jackson on his scenes and had little contact with other cast members, which include Martin Freeman , his co-star in the television series Sherlock.
Benedict can next be seen in on UK television in the drama Parade’s End which starts on 24 August.
Picture credit Benedict_Cumberbatch_at_the_London_premiere_of_Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy_(4).png: Sam Hughes from UK derivative work: RanZag [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
