Luke Evans, who plays Bard in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, is delighted to be using his own Welsh accent in the film.
In an interview with HitFix Luke says,
“I had a phone call with [co-screenwriter/producer] Philippa Boyens on the phone the night before my audition, and she said, ‘We want you to go in and do it in your Welsh accent. And I was like, ‘Really? I’ve never done a Welsh accent ever in anything.’ Even though it’s my accent, most people want to stamp it out. And she said, ‘No, we like it. We really like it.
“Because [the Bard is] an ancestor of Dale, I come from Dale, my ancestors are from Dale. And so they made everybody who has ancestry of Dale Welsh. So now there’s people in Lake-town who speak with a Welsh accent and you know that they have great-great-great-grandfathers or grandmothers that were actually from Dale. So all my children are Welsh in the film, I’m Welsh, and so Dale will always be Wales to me, which is a really nice thing.”
Luke says of his character Bard,
“There is a lot of personal emotion that he’s going through because he feels like he’s been slightly betrayed. He helped the dwarves, he got them into Lake-town and they caused this huge dragon to come down and kill most of the people that I knew…So when he gets to this mountain, it’s his last straw, that’s all he’s got left.”
Luke also speaks about his first scene in The Desolation of Smaug. He says,
“The first scene [I] did, I did with Ian [McKellen],” “It’s just a weird thing, isn’t it, when you’ve seen it [the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy] for ten years and all of a sudden you’re actually on set and he’s looking at you with the white eyes…It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant.”
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is in cinemas from 13 December, 2013 and worldwide from these dates.
