Armitage Loved Working With Weaving

During filming for Captain America: The First Avenger, British actor Richard Armitage passed Aussie Hugo Weaving in a hallway.
The encounter would not have been significant, except Armitage had recently been cast in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy.
With Armitage set to play dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield and Weaving reprising his role from The Lord of the Rings as the elf-lord Elrond, the two were about to venture to Middle-earth together.
"We kind of became chums," Armitage says from Sydney, where he's promoting the DVD and Blu-ray release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
"I think he (Weaving) really enjoyed that transformation and revisiting Elrond, what, 12 years later was kind of amusing for him."
Despite being friends, working with Weaving on the set of Rivendell was one of those unforgettable, surreal moments for Armitage.
Another was when he watched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the first time.
During filming Armitage got to know Cate Blanchett but unfortunately never got to film a scene with her.
"Thorin and Galadriel (Blanchett's character) don't meet but when I watched the movie and I heard Galadriel say Thorin's name and it sent a chill down my spine," he says.
"It felt so special that she was saying my name, because her character is just so ethereal and a goddess."
Armitage will get to see some of his castmates again when he returns to New Zealand for more filming this year.
"I think we've got ten more weeks because we haven't shot the final battle, which is the Battle of the Five Armies," he says.
Throughout the interview, Armitage is tight-lipped on what fans will see in the second and third films.
Before answering questions he frequently repeats "if you've read the book..." as he does when talking about the scenes he is about to shoot.
"If you've read the book, it's one of Tolkien's great epic battles," he says.
"To call on five armies, one of which is airborne, it's going to be pretty spectacular."
When Armitage does return to Middle-earth, one thing he's not looking forward to is the prosthetics.
As Thorin, he wears a prosthetic that covers his head, ears, nose, forehead and eyebrows, as well as a fat/muscle suit and costumes with heavy velvet, leather, fur and weaponry.
All up, he says it totalled about 25 kilos - like carrying 25 bags of sugar on your body.
"That's something that's a scary thing to go back to, because it's so hot," he says.
"You can literally feel the water trickling down the back of your neck all day. It's like being in a sauna."
While it's unlikely Armitage will want to keep his prosthetics when filming wraps, he does have a version of Thorin's sword - Orcrist - of his own.
"The weird thing is, I want to take it down to the gym and start swinging it around in preparation, but I don't think my gym would let me do that," he says pretending to swing the sword.
"'I'm just training, what's the problem?'"

"The weird thing is, I want to take it down to the gym and start swinging it around in preparation, but I don't think my gym would let me do that," he says pretending to swing the sword."'I'm just training, what's the problem?'"