Er hat es schon wieder getan: die Popcorn Taxi Seite mit dem Interview ist weltweit lahmgelegt hat Ali gerade getweetet ..

Richard Armitage was Popcorn Taxi’s very special guest earlier this month at a special screening of The Hobbit at the Cremorne Orpheum. Before he went on stage, Popcorn Taxi had a chat with him about the ins and outs of making The Hobbit, being Richard Armitage, the majestic Thorin Oakenshield, and what effect having an army of fans has on him.

Popcorn Taxi: Hello Richard. I’ve got a bunch of questions that I hope you haven’t been asked before. But in saying that, I’m repeating about a third of what most of the journalists have come in here asking.

Richard Armitage: It’s always interesting when you get the same question but asked in a slightly different way. But the reason they ask the question, I find interesting. What do they want to hear?… I like your phone case. I need a new one. That’s nice.

PT: I was actually going to give it away for the Sci Fi Show. It’s a mirror universe Star Trek thing. But my other one broke and I grabbed it.

RA: Well I’ve got an iPhone case with Thorin’s face on the back if you want one of those. Like you would.

PT: That’s fantastic. Do you have it?

RA: No. I’ll get you one.

PT: Seriously though, if you don’t have an Instagram of yourself holding that up and taking a photo of it, then you’re not doing your geek army proud. That’s the first thing I noticed when we announced the event, is the response.

RA: Oh, have you had a good response?

PT: Yes.

RA: Oh good.

PT: It’s remarkable. And the female response to your character and obviously yourself, which I find fundamentally puzzling. I mean, you’re a nice looking bloke, I’m sure you can act a bit.

RA: I can string a sentence together and walk and talk without bumping into the furniture. But that’s about it.

PT: Why?

RA: You know what? You need to point the microphone into the audience. Actually, don’t do that. I don’t know. I’ve been really lucky. I’ve got a really loyal little fan base of very well-educated, well-read ladies. Well I don’t think they’re all ladies. God, you know. But they’re incredibly supportive. I often do a lot of research. I didn’t know I was doing a Q & A screening until I read it on one of the websites and they were booking tickets. I was like, ‘Oh, that’ll be nice. I better brush my hair then’. No, they’re great. They’re really supportive. I try to look after them.



PT: Does it make any difference to you? Like walking down the street and you stub your toe and you think at least I’ve got twenty thousand females who would instantly help me out of that situation. Does it ever cross your mind?

RA: No, not really. I mean, I’ve lived for 41 years with relative anonymity. I guess if I had grown up as a child actor with that constantly around me then I would be as screwed as they all are. But I’m actually fairly normal. In fact, I’m probably the opposite. I’m not very gregarious. I kind of keep my head down and I value my invisibility.

PT: Some actors want to be the centre of attention and others act so they can be somebody else. I’m wondering whether you’ve ever thought that through and gone: ‘Well, Richard, what is it about myself that I don’t particularly like that I don’t want to be, and that’s why I’m much more comfortable as the King of Dwarves’?

RA: We were always told, ‘don’t bring the character to you, go to the character’. I always preferred leaving lots of myself outside the room and exploring the world through the eyes and the body and the mind of a different person who is ultimately better than you are. Even if they’re a mass murderer, they’re infinitely more interesting than you are. People talk about The Method, or whatever. I don’t think I’m a Method actor. I have a method but I don’t believe you have to be a mass murderer to play a mass murderer.

I don’t believe I have to be a dwarf who gets dragon sickness to play Thorin Oakenshield. But I’m fascinated to see what his world looks like or what the world looks like through his eyes. And it does give you courage to do that because you get given a bunch of lines to say that I would never say. It’s liberating. And then you take it off at the end of the day and I slump around the streets with my shoulders hunched, back to boring old me. It’s great!



PT: Andy Serkis is a guy who throws himself, child-like, idiot-like, into Gollum. He’s dressed in grey Spandex with spots all over him, jumping around like a lunatic. Yet it is this emphatic process that provides the reality of Gollum that we engage with; his total commitment is what makes it work. Can you see yourself doing the same thing? Have you and Andy had a chat where you said: ‘Look, I’m doing pretty much the same thing’, or are there differences in your approach?

RA: No, we never did have a talk like that but I think I valued the lack of empathy Peter (Jackson) had for pushing an actor to tears, which both Peter and Andy share. They don’t recognise when you’re on your knees. I don’t know. There’s no kind of malevolence in it. It was something that I really liked. That you’d think, ‘I don’t have another take in me’ but both of them would be like ‘Can you do another one?’ and you’d be like, ‘Yep, I can do another one. Because I know that you would do another one if you were standing here dressed as Gollum’.

I love Andy’s work. I love the world he’s investigating at the moment. The performance capture. I come from quite a physical background so I love working on the character’s physicality and changing that. I’ve never gone to the extreme of playing something that’s not human. Although a dwarf isn’t human, I guess. But I would love to. I love that kind of reinvention of a physical identity, which Andy does a lot. I’d like to work with him on that.

PT: It really goes back to the fundamentals of acting.

RA: Yeah. Most of the time when I’m putting a character together—I used a bison for Thorin. I felt that he had that kind of top-heaviness and the charge in him. In another world I probably would have spent four weeks doing a bison animal study but we were kind of focusing on the dwarf movement. And I wanted him to look relatively human. But no, I’d like to go further with all that.

PT: There’s a lot of fun to be had within the process… of shooting. Swinging a sword must be a fun way to make a living. The Orcrist is a very particular blade to use, very different to most other blades found in theatre and film. What did you and Mana Davis, your fight double and fight coach, discuss when preparing these scenes?

RA: Tolkien makes his weapons characters. Orcrist had a character. The first time I saw the shape of the sword I was really happy with it because it had a curved blade, which meant it was going to move in a certain way. It wasn’t going to be a regular type thing. And it wasn’t going to be a broad sword. It was a kind of Samurai-type weapon so I knew it was going to flow in a certain way. So I worked with Mana on a way of making that sword flourish. It’s a two-handed sword but at times could be a one-handed sword, so we devised a selection of moves that would really suit that blade and then he worked on exercises so I could strengthen my wrists and arms to make it look as good as what he’s doing. So that was thrilling.

The interesting side of it is that I felt an affinity with that weapon, even though it was an elf blade, and that’s sort of the paradox of Thorin, his distaste for the elves hasn’t stopped him from picking up that sword that was elf-made and using it to his advantage. So he’s a complicated character.



PT: It’s like a good motive, isn’t it? You could hate Saabs and then get into a 900 and know it is a finely-tuned machine.

RA: It’s like the Brits driving around in Volkswagens during the Second World War. We’ll go to war with them but we’ll drive around in their far superior cars.

PT: You’ve done principal shooting and obviously you’ve got re-shoots down the track, but for the most part, the heavy lifting of Thorin Oakenshield is done…

RA: No, the heavy-lifting isn’t done. We’ve got the whole of the Battle of the Five Armies to shoot.

PT: Okay… So there’s a lot more to do.

RA: It’s bloody terrifying. I started training again at the beginning of this year because the biggest battle of the entire trilogy, and possibly something bigger than you may have seen in Lord of the Rings, the Battle of the Five Armies, is coming and we haven’t shot a single move of it yet. So that’s something to look forward to, and to be terrified of.

PT: Although at that stage, I guess you kind of know what you’re doing. But at the same time, the amount of work must be slightly daunting.

RA: Yeah. And all those moves that I was talking about, that was over a year ago. So I’ve got to remind myself what we were doing. And lazy old me thinks, ‘Oh, it’s fine. I can do it’. But I know that I’ve got to get back into that stunt hanger with the guys, swing that sword around again and get back up to speed. That’s my work for the next two to three months.

PT: Wow. I guess it’s better than…

RA: … Everything else in life. I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

PT: I want to go back to that original idea of disappearing and going into a character. Is there a door for you? Obviously the physicality of it is something—the animal, etc. But is there another door where you go, ‘Well this is how he sees the world’ or is there a particular something that you latch onto, that you go, ‘This is the key’?

RA: I think that’s why I tend to write a biography for the character. I always start with where the character is now and what they want and why they’re kind of moving in a direction directly related to the story. Then you build something that can help inform all of those choices that you’re going to make as that character. How they see the world and what their motivations are. But then you retrofit the biography to suit that.

With this character, Tolkien did it all. It’s all in the Appendices. All I had to do was go look for it and read it and extract everything that I needed to know. And you know, things get handed down the generations so I wanted to find out what all the rivalries, antagonisms were between the dwarves and the elves and where they came from because you carry all those around with you.

PT: So when Lee Pace walks by and you just go… And you can’t help yourself. Or is it something that you really have to…

RA – Well if it’s relevant to the scene you’re shooting, you normally have to kind of simplify it. So you do all of your work prior to shooting and then when it comes to shooting, you just think: ‘What do I really need to know about this scene in terms of what’s happening now, what’s changing in this moment, and what’s informing it, what’s the fuel inside the engine?’, if you know what I mean?

So the fuel that you put inside the engine is all of that backstory. And there are different grades of fuel that you put in and sometimes the fuel ignites very quickly and sometimes it burns very slowly.



PT: It seems a sensible approach to such a long filming process. By taking each scene as it comes.

RA: Absolutely. Thorin needed a big tank of fuel because he’s on a long, long journey and he had to burn right through to the end and then explode in the mountain. So it was kind of painstaking, picking through and plotting those moments, but also plotting those moments in three acts so you have to have a climax at the end of the first act—second act, which we don’t really know what that’s going to be yet—and then, obviously, the third act climax; if you’ve read the book, you know where it’s going.

PT: I want to take it back to where it all began. You’re sitting in a London hovel, you don’t know where you’re next meal is coming from and suddenly you get this phone call, this odd New Zealand accent saying, ‘Hey bro, do you wanna be in a movie’? How did you go from being a successful actor in England and to a pop culture icon?

RA: It was really, really simple. It was possibly one of the simplest auditions I’ve ever been through, which is why I didn’t quite believe it when it happened. Because I was working on Spooks and I got a phone call from my agent saying, ‘They’d like to meet you. They’re in town’.

There was a little bit of guidance as to what they were looking for. I felt that I was too young for the character, too tall for that character, so I thought, you know, ‘I’ll just look at the scene they’ve written’. And then I realised the essence of the character that they were aiming for. So I went to meet Peter and Phillipa and we read some of the scenes. I think we spent an hour-and-a-half talking about the character and what their vision was, and I sort of explained who I thought he was, and that was it.

Then, maybe a month later, my agent said, ‘Come have dinner’. We sat down and he said, ‘So, they want to offer you Thorin Oakenshield’. I had to pick myself up off the floor. It was amazing. Yeah, you don’t get that phone call every day, do you?

PT: Not every day, no. But then it would have dawned on you: the workload you were in for.

RA: Yeah, my first instinct, whenever that kind of thing happens, is to say, ‘Well what’s wrong with the part? Why did nobody else want it’? Which is kind of the story of my life really. When I get offered something, I’m like, ‘Well there must be something wrong with it if they’re offering it to me!’.

But at that point the film wasn’t green-lit and—British people—my agent is very pragmatic. He said, ‘Don’t get excited, the film isn’t green-lit, it may not go’. And there were so many obstacles to get through so it wasn’t a jumping up and down moment. It was like, ‘Okay, let’s not get too excited about this’. So I kind of held on to the reigns a little bit. But I was in Los Angeles when the film got green-lit and that was the day that we had that glass of champagne to go, ‘Okay, this is really happening’.

PT: Because the lead up to The Hobbit being green-lit really was tortuous.

RA: Tortuous and full of effort from Peter and all of his team to get it up.

PT: How long into that process were you chosen as Thorin? Did you have to sit nervously on the sidelines for long?

RA: I think it was fairly late. It was towards the end of 2010. And also, they wanted me to commit to it without the film being green-lit, which I was happy to do because my commitment meant that I had faith in them, because they showed faith in me.

But you know, the thing is, you talk about all of this: ‘How did you get the role? And how did it feel when you got the role?’ And once all that’s died down you start to think, ’I've actually got to go and play this now’. They’ve trusted me. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s celebrated, the phones have gone down and the deal’s been done. Now it’s over to me to make the role work.

And that’s the scariest moment, because you do have that elation and then the work begins and you think, ‘How the hell am I going to do this?’

You just go back to all the basics you know and you think, ‘I’ve just got to throw everything at this one. I’ve got to do all of that work that I always do on the character and just get down to the nitty-gritty and forget about the glory and just do the work’. So that’s what I did. And I had plenty of time to do it, which was good.



PT: It seems to have paid off reasonably well.

RA: Thank you. I haven’t seen what movies two and three are like yet. I may come crashing down but I doubt it.

PT: Obviously you’re aware that you have ‘popped out’ of this film. I mean the character in itself was always going to be interesting but the fact that Richard Armitage is King of the Dwarves is actually a pop culture thing now.

RA: Oh good.

PT: Seriously. It’s extraordinary. There’s Martin Freeman and all his Sting-waving, but there will always be a bunch of people who will want to be Thorin Oakenshield rather then the Hobbit.

RA: Good. Little kids running around being Thorin Oakenshield. And very well-educated ladies.

PT: You’ve done all the Tolkien reading, which is rare among actors going into a part, knowing something about the actual property that they’re working on.

RA: God, don’t start testing me on Tolkien.

PT: No, I’ll leave that for if you go on Steven Colbert…

RA: I feel like I did go on Steven Colbert. He came to New Zealand and had an over-the-table competition with Phillipa. His knowledge is just insane.

PT: It’s terrifying.

RA: I was in that room with Steven Fry adjudicating. It was brilliant. In fact, it would make a great piece of television. If they filmed it it would have been genius. It was like the Tolkien version of QI.

PT: Wow. That’s the thing. Because you meet fans… and then you meet the next level.

RA: That study.

PT: Thank you very much for your time.

RA: Thank you.

PT: It’s remarkable. And the female response to your character and obviously yourself, which I find fundamentally puzzling. I mean, you’re a nice looking bloke, I’m sure you can act a bit.

RA: I can string a sentence together and walk and talk without bumping into the furniture. But that’s about it.
[b]

Das ist ne Gute Frage, Floumi. Ist irgendwie schon bezeichnend, oder? Das wir es in Europa so gar nicht fertig bringen Richard mal was richtig interessantes zu fragen... und das wo Europa doch angeblich so verrückt nach dem Hobbit und Richard ist

Umso besser, dass es wenigstens die 'Aussies' hinbekommen haben uns Fans was Gutes zu liefern :grins:

Richard ist eben personifiziertes britisches Understatement ...