The Hobbit Celebration: Richard Armitage Q&A
Getting into the troubled mind of Thorin Oakenshield...

The Hobbit Celebration: Richard Armitage Q&A
Getting into the troubled mind of Thorin Oakenshield...
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The Hobbit Celebration: Richard Armitage Q&A
How does it feel, knowing this will be our last cinematic visit to Middle-earth?
As an audience member, and now a cast member, it’s slightly bittersweet isn’t it? But weirdly, this final film feels like a whole new beginning. It’s certainly not Peter Jackson finishing his story. The battle itself is an entirely new narrative, it’s a little movie all of its own.

What is the significance of this battle to you?
The politics and the rise of The Battle Of The Five Armies becomes much more than just a money grab. It’s not about that pile of gold, which is really what Tolkien was writing when he wrote the novel. But I think Tolkien went back and went, “no, there’s more to this,” which is why he went on to do Lord Of The Rings. I think he was expanding on his own ideas even as he was writing. And I like the fact that you think… You know, there’s a siege on the mountain because they’ve all come to claim their gold, so these armies have arrived and Thorin says, “I’m not going to negotiate with you when you come to my door armed for war”. But the fact is the orcs and the forces of evil turn up, and they’re not after the money, they’re after something greater than that. They’re after world domination. Tolkien has the armies unite and fight in opposition. I think the political narrative is quite striking, and you have to have Sauron, you have to have him rising. That connects into the six films.

How would you sum up the dwarves’ agenda in terms of this battle — or that of Thorin himself?
I don’t think Thorin has particularly planned beyond the moment when they reclaim the mountain: “we get back in, we get rid of the dragon, we claim our gold and we lock the door,” that’s always been the plan. Getting out of Lake Town, offering them a piece of the pie, was a strategy. I don’t think Thorin ever really believed that he would share any of the gold, but he becomes acute once he gets inside the mountain and he starts to become affected by the dragon-sickness. But he’s seen Erebor before the fall, and he has lived through it. So the potential for it to happen again is similar to anyone who has lived through a traincrash or an earthquake or anything — it’s there, it’s right on the edge of his nose, that it could happen again. It has happened before in his lifetime and everybody turned their backs on him, so his grasp on what is in that mountain is tight, and added to the fact that he starts to lose his mind, he tightens that grip to the point of inertia, which kicks off this battle. And everyone arrives at the gates expecting to be paid what they were promised, Thranduil being one of them. The one person who turned his back on the dwarves when they were expelled by the dragon before, and he stands there with his hands out saying, “where’s our share?” I mean, what would you do? You’re not going to bend, especially not if you’re a dwarf, with the pride and character that they have. He’s going to flip them the finger and tell them to go home.

Martin Freeman said of Thorin that he almost has "a messiah complex"…
That’s interesting.

The Hobbit Celebration: Richard Armitage Q&A

What do you make of that?
Yeah, well I suppose from Bilbo’s perspective that would probably be something that he sees. Tolkien writes this moment in the book, which I remember being shocked at, as a kid, when Thorin picks Bilbo up and hangs him over the edge of the wall, and orders him to be thrown from the wall — such a violent act in a kid’s book to a character that we’ve grown with and loved. So to get them to that point, there had to be a sort of squeezing of the loyalties. And part of that is when Thorin starts to lock out all of his comrades, all of his dwarf friends, and becomes so singly fixated on Bilbo as his ally — and in that respect it does get Messianic.

How was it actually shooting the battle?
Endless… Relentless… Everyone was shooting their own pieces, in different locations. I never saw any of the elves, or the men fighting, because they largely fight over in Dale. As it would be. In a way, that’s what is intriguing about it. It’s not like there is a battlefield there and they start fighting. It’s happening, it’s messy, you don’t know where anyone’s fighting. We lose half of our men; we don’t know where the other armies are. The dwarves come out into the middle of a melee and have to figure out who’s where and where the weak ones are… In terms of the logistics, there’d be two or three units working and we’d know that Bard was with his army fighting somewhere up on Mount Cook, and we’d be at the studio doing our fight, so it was pretty exciting. So no one knew what anyone else had done. Nobody knew about anybody else’s fight scenes. But every single sword swing and punch that I threw has ended up in the film, which I was really surprised about.

So you did a lot of the stunt work?
I did about three weeks’ worth of fighting, yeah. No, it was one of the challenges I set myself: “I wanna do everything I possibly can, so that when Pete gets the edit, he will be torn as to whether to use the real me, the stunt me, or the digital me. I’m going to make him not be able to use anything except the real guy doing it.” And I didn’t tell him this.

Didn’t you shoot most of the battle during pick-ups?
All of it happened in pickups. I was ready to fight a year earlier and then we wrapped and I came back a year later and my stamina, which was ready back then, had to be regenerated. But it was such a unknown quantity… It was like training for a marathon that you didn’t know how many miles you were gonna have to run. They haven’t announced how long the marathon is going to be, but you still have to train for it. Because they worked the fights out as you went along, so I had no concept of how long my fight was going to be or how long was I gonna have to fight for, who I was fighting with or what weapon was I using. How do you train for that? And your director is like, “right, another take, another take,” and you’re doing 12 beats, which doesn’t sound like a lot but when you’re doing 10 takes of 12 beats... But the thing [Peter Jackson] did do was sit me down beforehand and say: “this is the journey, this is where your character is going to fight, this is what’s gonna happen...” So I had a rough idea of how long the marathon was going to be!

What’s it like saying goodbye to Thorin?
It’s quite emotional. But he goes out in a flame of glory. There’s a redemption… Peter doesn’t disappoint in terms of allowing that character to re-find his heroisms at the moment when it’s most necessary and he truly allows that character to find it, full throttle.

Did you get a parting gift?
There was a parting gift, the parting gift happened before pick-ups, but, yeah, my parting gift was my weapons, and the map and the key. Weirdly enough, I cherish those as much as the sword, because it was one of those personal props I always had with me. I always had the key around my neck and I always had the map in my pocket. Something I had daily contact with.

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Interview by Ian Nathan