Meet Richard Armitage, the chameleon king

December 13, 2012 9:00 am • By Joe Williams joewilliams@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8344


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When “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” opens worldwide on Friday, the actor who plays the dwarf king Thorin will rise from a British television star to an international movie star.

Receiving visitors in a New York hotel room last week, Richard Armitage said he had strong feelings about his pending coronation.

“I’m dreading it.”

Armitage, 41, is about half the age of the character he plays in Peter Jackson’s planned trilogy of “Hobbit” films. Onscreen, the tall, handsome actor is hard to recognize, with a prosthetic nose, a dreadlock wig and a flowing beard. Still, Armitage said he was summoning his magic power of disappearing into a crowd, a skill he learned in his native England while working in the TV spy series “Spooks” (distributed in America as “MI-5”).

“I’ve learned the art of invisibility,” he said.

In the upcoming hurricane drama “Black Sky,” his first starring role in the United States, he disappears behind an American accent, as he did for a small role in “Captain America: The First Avenger.”

Like disguise, Armitage’s voice is another one of his secret weapons. He has a background in both Shakespearean drama and musical theater — he even played an elf in a stage production of “The Hobbit” when he was a boy — so he is accustomed to commanding a stage.

In “An Unexpected Journey,” his character rallies a dozen dwarves, the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) to storm the mountain fortress where a dragon has seized the kingdom’s gold.

Yet instead of a stirring speech, it is Thorin’s mournful fireside song that persuades homebody Bilbo to join the quest.

“I wanted his voice to be quiet yet able to fill a room,” Armitage said. “And I wanted him to be able to scream and command an army on a battlefield. That’s a lot to ask. So I did vocal work every day, experimenting with dialects and bits of Shakespeare. For the song, I practiced it very early in rehearsals and kept lowering the pitch until I got it right. But your voice tends to return to its natural level, so you have to constantly retrain it.”

When Armitrage trained for his role in “Spooks,” he underwent waterboarding because his character would have endured it too. He repeated the experience for the British TV series “Strike Back.”

“It’s most definitely a form of torture,” he said.

Reminded that he shares a name with a former American diplomat who helped rally the Bush administration for the war on terror, Armitage smiled.

“I’m a completely different person,” he said.

“I’m a completely different person,” he said.