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How Richard Armitage Let Thorin Become Unhinged in ‘The Hobbit’
The movie may be called “The Hobbit” but make no mistake: “The Battle of the Five Armies,” the third and final installment in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, belongs to Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarves.
In the film, Thorin, played by British actor Richard Armitage, has a story arc as wide, winding and treacherous as the Misty Mountains of Middle-earth.
After Thorin reunites with his kingdom’s lost treasures of gold at the Lonely Mountain, or Erebor, he goes mad with “dragon sickness,” and starts to distrust his fellow dwarves in an obsessive hunt for the shiny Arkenstone. Things turn really bad when he refuses to honor agreements with the elf king Thranduil and Bard the Bowman, and all hell nearly breaks loose when he threatens to kill his Hobbit friend, Bilbo Baggins.
“I think insanity is the hardest thing to play,” Armitage said in an interview. “I read up on schizophrenia, I read up on drug addiction, I read up on Alzheimer’s — because Thorin’s lost himself.”
The actor, 43, sat with the Journal to discuss how he played Thorin unhinged, his own relationship with wealth, and reciting some of Tolkien’s most famous lines.
Did you draw upon any real-life examples to portray “dragon sickness”?
The film was greenlit in 2011, so in 2008 the whole crash happened. You don’t use direct examples but it was certainly in my head. When it came to studying insanity, [J.R.R.] Tolkien just called it dragon sickness and didn’t describe it in great detail, so is it a physical ailment? Is it a mental ailment? Is it both? I wanted it to feel like he was inconsistent, unpredictable. Sometimes the dragon sickness would enliven him like a drug does, and you’d see him more vibrant than you’d ever seen him before, and then a real comedown.
Is it liberating to let him become unhinged?
It is, and you do all of your serious research and you start looking at the reality of insanity and you think, okay, I’ve got to play this in a fantasy film so it’s got to be something which isn’t alienating. In a weird way it’s got to be entertaining to watch him fall, so that we can call him back. As an audience we need to be shouting, “Wake up!”
Have you ever been on that precipice and felt the lure of wealth or power?
I never really have. I come from very conservative parents and we weren’t particularly wealthy, but we were comfortable. In terms of my career, I’ve never made any decision so far based on finance. I didn’t become an actor because I thought I’d make lots of money. I’ve never taken a job because it would pay any kind of money — sometimes as an actor you work for no money at all. I’m not interested in building wealth, which is kind of naive and probably frowned on, living in America. It’s something that people don’t necessarily understand, but if I die poor, I die poor.
Thorin’s fate and actions are so closely linked to his father and grandfather. Is there a thread that connects you to your father and grandfather?
Totally. I think it’s one of those things that everybody has. It’s not that you want to better your parents but you want to take the baton from them and cross the finishing line. But there’s a point in your life when you realize, “I have to pass the baton now. No one ever finishes this race.” But I also feel that my parents looked at me and went, “We want him to have more than we had.” I certainly know that my father had a relatively poor upbringing and worked very, very hard throughout his life. I don’t necessarily think he enjoyed his job so one of the things I decided when I was very young was, “I’m going to do a job that I leap out of bed for in the morning.” That was my primary reason for choosing this art form. I’m sure it gave my parents a big headache of worry, but it was nice to take them to the premiere in London [of “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”] and say “we did it.”
What did your father say after watching the premiere?
My father doesn’t express himself in words very much, but I could hear him sniffing as the film was drawing to its close. I could hear him emotionally moved from it. When I wanted to go to a vocational school to study singing and dance and drama, my mom went out to work and took a job, and every single penny of her income went toward my schooling. To take them to the premiere was nice for me to say, “this is what it was all for.”
Do you have siblings?
I do, I have an older brother. He works a 9-to-5 job with motor vehicles. There’s a little nephew who wants to be an actor. He’s 10. He’s sort of the opposite of me. He’s very gregarious and he’s a real entertainer, whereas I’m not at all.
How does your brother feel about his son wanting to become an actor?
We don’t say anything but he just looks at me with a kind of “I wonder if he’ll grow out of this” look and I look back at him thinking, probably not.
How did you and Martin Freeman decide you would approach your final scene together?
We didn’t communicate about it at all. It was deliberate. It’s one of those scenes that you don’t want to rehearse, you don’t want to overwork, you don’t want to overthink. I know how loaded the words were for me. A lot of them are from the book, there’s a little bit of embellishment and readjustment. When I first read the script, I just thought, okay leave that scene alone. It’s the one time in the movie where I just thought, there’s no acting here. You just have to look the other character in the eye. I never saw Martin as Martin — I always saw him as Bilbo. It’s just two characters that speak the truth to each other. It’s one of the nicest, simplest moments in the film.
Thorin’s final lines are among the most famous written by Tolkien. So, you were careful not to overthink them?
I trust my instincts in that respect. When you’re hired for the job, that moment in the story is always coming. From the minute you get the phone call saying “we’re offering you the role,” I was thinking, I’m going to have to play that scene at some point. It was a long time coming. It was very, very close to the end of filming, so you’re always building up for it and thinking, I hope that I can fulfill that. I hope that I do it justice. I hope that we can create this journey whereby there is the payoff in that moment. So, for all of the times when we were making Thorin alienating and allowing the audience to really dislike him, we knew that at some point, we’d have to turn it around for that scene.
Has “The Hobbit” changed your life?
I have such vivid memories of filming. It was a huge chunk of my life. It’s almost like I have to think, what happened before “The Hobbit”? Where was I? I have to try and remember those bits because “The Hobbit” is so vivid in my head, and fairly recent. I think the way it’s changed my life is that the global reach of the films has an impact. Certainly this year, being on stage in “The Crucible,” I felt it acutely that we filled the theater very, very quickly and people had come from all over the world to see the play. I was just astonished. It was only really a 900-seat theater but it fills me with a sense of expectation and pride that the people have traveled that far.
Why won’t “The Crucible” transfer to New York?
People keep asking on Twitter. We can’t even show the movie here in the cinemas because the rights are held by another producer until a certain date. I believe there’s another production in the process of being made. We can’t bring our play here, which is a great shame. I think a lot of people in North America wanted to see it in the cinema. But they will be able to download it, because we filmed it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEB-85622
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Danke für's Posten, Oaky! 
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) Egal, von woher man kommt, kann man das Beste aus seinem Leben machen.