The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey cast reveal their boot camp mission
STV 17 December 2012 17:00 GMT


With a lot of swashbuckling sword fights, dragons to slay and Orcs to deal with it's no wonder the cast of The Hobbit needed to get into shape and learn some new skills for their adventure.

With over 274 days of shooting and three Hobbit films to make – An Unexpected Journey the first part of a trilogy by filmmaker Peter Jackson – some of the cast were given extensive training at a 'dwarf boot camp' to get them ready for filming the action scenes – and to help them get into character.

In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey a young Bilbo Baggins has no desire to hit the road, after a company of dwarves turn up to enlist him on a quest to retake a dwarf mountain kingdom from the dragon that decimated it.

However, he eventually leaves on his journey, encountering trolls, goblins, savage orcs and the return of Gollum.

Martin Freeman, who plays the hobbit, learned some new skills at the boot camp.

"I was part of it, obviously not the dwarfish bit as I didn't have to move like a dwarf and I didn't have to learn the same things that they learned, but yeah, fighting, horse riding, stunts, all that," he recalled.

But the boot camp wasn't just to build up the actors skills.

"Really the purpose of all that, even though ostensibly is to do this fighting in the dwarf boot camp, what's really happening there of course is a group of actors getting to know each other, because that's the vital bit," explained Freeman.

"We're going to spend 18 months together in front of a camera and also hanging out, we have to bond and we have to be a team."

Richard Armitage, who plays exiled dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield, picked up a new skill, and one which he didn't think would be useful at first.

"The thing that surprised me the most that I didn't think we really needed but one of our stunt team was a champion wrestler and we did a whole session of wrestling whereby you'd really take an opponent down to the ground and try and pin them to the floor," explained Armitage.

"Although we weren't going to be doing that in the movie, it really kind of gave us a weighted, grounded feeling of pushing another heavy being to the floor. I don't know, there's an element of that in the dwarves about the way they move, the way they fight. That wrestling was really useful."

Another skill that seemed to stump most of the cast was using a bow and arrow.

"I'm a really bad shot when it comes to archery," admitted Armitage.

"There were a couple of arrows that ended up in the ceiling – and I had to sneakily remove them and cover the holes so nobody knew that it was me."

Aidan Turner who plays Kili the dwarf, found himself up against an elf who proved to have skills in the area.

"I went head to head with Orlando Bloom for archery lessons," he said. Bloom played Legolas in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and reprises his role for the third and final Hobbit film There And Back Again.

Turner added: “I thought I was a pretty good shot but he was awesome and quite competitive too, and he nailed me every time.

“I was quite disappointed I wasn't quite as good as shot as he was but he had a lot of practice too."