Photo credit: Jed Brophy.
Middle-earth News reporters Amanda Capley and Valdis Longbeard had the honor of interviewing fan favorite Jed Brophy during Dragon Con 2014. We shared the first two parts of that interview over the last two weeks (Part 1, Part 2). Here is the conclusion of that wonderfully fun interview.
AC: Do you have any new projects lined up?
Jed Brophy: Yeah, I just completed work on a feature film called The Dead Room, which is a little three… it’s only three actors. It’s a ghost story set in a house which, our job to prove that it’s not haunted, for insurance purposes, and it turns out it’s very badly haunted. And then I’ve been working on a project which we are looking to try and get the crowd funding for to make it into a feature. We shot the last twenty minutes of a chase scene in a movie called Mad Dog Quinn, which is a steampunk western that’s set sort of 2025. So it’s set in the future, and it’s set in New Zealand, where all the water has dried up and the government owns all the water rights. I’m the leader of the regulators, who are the government enforcers. I actually have some images to show some of the fans, that we shot in Tekapo earlier this year. And then I’m doing a theatre show with my son, which we’ve just also acquired the film rights to, a little two-hander called An Unseasonable Fall of Snow, which is a “whodunit.” It’s a man and a younger man in a room, and you think the younger man has done something really bad, and that the older man might be a cop, a policeman. But as the story goes on, you realize actually that they’re a lot closer than you thought to begin with. And I’ve been on the playwright’s case for a long time to turn this into a feature film, and when he saw our production in January, he kind of agreed that it might be possible. That’s a film that I’m trying to develop myself, and trying to get funding for. And then Mark Hadlow and I are doing a test shoot for a feature that we’re doing next year. We’re shooting two days for the director to kind of map out some of the story, which is, again, kind of a whodunit. So, yeah, I’m lucky to be a busy boy.
Image credit: Jed Brophy.
VL: So–obviously we know everything is very “hush-hush,”–is there anything you can tell us about what’s in store for Nori in the last Hobbit film?
Jed Brophy: Apart from him becoming king… No, I can’t really say too much about it. I think what’s interesting for me is the fourth film, the Ori-Dori-Nori story, where you see Nori setting up his hairdressing salons all around Middle-earth and creating his hair products. It’s one of those things where… I’ve just done ADR, and I’ve seen some of the film, but there’s so many special effects shots to come, and that’s what’s kind of happening in Wellington at the moment, that we won’t really know until we see it. And Peter’s very… good… at not letting us see too much, because he knows that we do interviews like this, and that we are gossipers. Not that he’s a control freak, but he does like to keep it until… You know, we sort of get to see it the day before the rest of the audience get to see it, and I like that. I like that fact that you don’t see too much of it, because there are film experiences where I’ve seen so much of the rushes and so much of the ADR and the production where, kind of, that when you get to finally see the film, it’s kind of a let-down. And I know that seeing the first two films was just as exciting for us as it was for the people coming to the premiere, because we hadn’t actually seen it! And there is that thing of, “How much am I left? Am I actually in the film?” You know? That’s the worst thing as an actor, is how much is actually left in there, am I in it at all? You hope that they’ll ring you and say, “Hey, don’t come to the premiere, because you’re not in it.” In Lord of the Rings, I actually redid a scene for an actor who wasn’t told that I’d redone the scene, and we sat next to each other at the premiere, and he was nudging me going, “Here’s my bit coming up,” and I was going “Oh, no! Do I tell him that it’s…” And then when it was me, he was like, “You must have known, and you didn’t…” and I was like, “Well, I, I…” You know, what can you say?
Photo credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
So, it’s going to be sad. I would say to people, “Bring your tissues.” I mean, I know that when some of the scenes that we shot were incredibly moving for us, and if they’re moving for us, they’ll be more so for the audience. It’s going to be exciting. I know one of the discussions I had with Peter, for the fan thing in November that we did last November, was all about how to make it as good as Helm’s Deep. Helm’s Deep is an iconic battle, you know, and when people talk about battles on film, that kind of sets the benchmark. And so the Battle of the Five Armies has to be at least as good as that, if not better, and I know that… I love the fact that he’s up for that challenge, that he wants to make it better, you know? That’s what makes Peter such an amazing filmmaker, is he’s not resting on his laurels, he’s always trying to push the envelope, of not just technology, but also how much impact he can have on the audience. And so, without having said it, I think people are going to be in a real roller coaster ride. I think it’s going to be incredibly exciting, but also quite sad. And more so because it’s the end of the Middle-earth franchise. You know, when this film premieres, for me, and for Ian, and for Hugo, and Cate, and loads of people who worked on Rings too, it’s the end of six or seven years of our careers, and we didn’t want it to finish. I know that Ian was in tears on the last day we shot, it was incredibly sad, it was, you know, it was like ‘He’s leaving us, and that’s it! No more master class!” You know? Watching him on set every day was like a master class. He is the best actor on the planet. He really is. He’s incredible. Yeah. So, yes, I think it will be a bittersweet moment, actually. I’m not looking… You know, part of me’s not looking forward to it, because it’ll be quite sad to say good-bye to it. And every other film project that I do, although they have their own unique thing, they’re not going to be like these films.
AC: Our last thing – it’s kind of a speed round sort of thing. The fans sort of feel like we know The hobbit actors so well by know, by you guys on Twitter, and you guys do the behind the scenes, and what not. What is one piece of information that the fans don’t know about these five people?
Stephen Hunter.
Jed Brophy: What they DON’T know about Stephen Hunter. When I first met him, he was a radio DJ.
AC: Oh, really?
Jed Brophy: Yeah, he used to work for a radio station in Hamilton, and he was a radio DJ. And I was doing a film—a play—called Ladies’ Night, which I think The Full Monty kind of stole and made into a film. I played a stripper. So that the first time I met Stephen I wasn’t wearing many clothes. So there you go. There’s one!
The Los Angeles Premiere for the fantasy adventure “THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES,” a production of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures (MGM), released by Warner Bros. Pictures and MGM. Photo credit: Eric Charbonneau.
AC: Graham McTavish.
Jed Brophy: [Laughs] Oh, how do I say this without getting into trouble? Umm… [laughs]… Graham doesn’t love horses. Graham’s a little scared of horses. Although he’s done a lot of films where he has to be on horses, he’s not the most confident horse rider. Sorry Graham! You know part of me’s only joking.
Photo via Herr-der-Ringe-Film. Photo credit: Warner Bros. Pictures.
AC: Richard Armitage.
Jed Brophy: Oh, yeah. He’s just the most generous guy on the planet. He really is. He’s not just the leader of men on screen, he’s a leader of men off screen. We would have followed him anywhere. He just has that way about him, where he encourages you to do your best. Yeah. Yeah, I trained with him in the gym a lot. He’s probably the strongest person I’ve ever trained with, just in terms of his mental… He will push himself above and beyond, and he did that every day on set as well. So, yeah, he’s… Most people would know that about anyway, but he is just one of those incredibly generous people.
— Jed Brophy (@BrophyJed) July 28, 2013
AC: And Aidan Turner.
Jed Brophy: Is a brilliant painter.
AC: Really?
Jed Brophy: Mm-hmm. Although he would hate me saying that, because he doesn’t rate it. But I saw some of the art that he did when he had days off , and I think that he’s got a lot of talent.
AC: And finally, Adam Brown.
Jed Brophy: Adam Brown. Most people would know this, but he’s a very, very funny man. He’s a natural comedian. And he’s got some incredibly funny stories. They would know that it was his first film. He keeps saying to me that he thought they had the wrong Adam Brown , that there was an Adam Brown in America, and he was pretty sure that they had cast him. There wouldn’t be much that people don’t know about Adam by now, he’s pretty all over Twitter and Facebook.
Thank you, Jed, for your time and for sharing so much with us and our readers! We hope to have the opportunity to talk to you again, perhaps at Dragon Con 2015!
In case you missed the first two parts of our interview with Jed, you can find them here: Part 1, Part 2.
