Benedict Cumberbatch might play giant dragon Smaug in “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies,” but he said he was far from majestic and fearsome on the performance capture set where he actually acted out the creature.
In an interview with the New York Daily News while promoting his new film, the "Sherlock" star revealed that he often felt like he was “a gray sausage with dots on it” while dressed in the ridiculously tight gray Lycra performance capture suit pocked by reflectors.
However, according to Cumberbatch, even the strange outfit didn't stop him from enjoying playing a dragon onscreen immensely.
“You just treat it as a normal day in an office, even though your face is painted like a mathematically correct aboriginal and you’re covered in this gray material like some sort of amorphous blob,” Cumberbatch told the publication.
“You look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘What have I reduced myself to?’ And then you go out and completely lose yourself in the joy,” he continued.
The lycra suit and its dots have a purpose, of course. The reflectors are the points on the body that are picked up by dozens of cameras lining the “volume” where the scene is being shot. Inside that area, an actor’s movements are fed into a computer program that plots out a three-dimensional figure mirroring the motion.
The computer data taken from Cumberbatch was eventually used by the programmers at Weta Digital to render the final animated form of Smaug in the film.
The head of the special effects house, four-time Academy Award winner Joe Leterri, revealed that because Cumberbatch isn’t shaped like a dragon, most of the data couldn’t be used in the final look of the dragon. However, the actor played a role in another important aspect of the making of Smaug: getting the animators inside the dragon’s head.
“By having Benedict on a stage in a performance capture suit, Peter could direct him as full performance,” Letteri said. “It helped us to start to get a sense of his inner character.”
The experience Cumberbatch gained in working with performance capture suits and sensors while filming the "Hobbit" trilogy also paved the way for another role for the actor. The 37-year-old has signed up to play and voice Shere Khan in director Andy Serkis' "Jungle Book: Origins," according to Hollywood Reporter.
“It freed me to be a complete child,” Cumberbatch said. “My imagination was the only limit.”
If you haven't seen the last installment of Peter Jackson's six-part epic, "The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies," starring Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Evangeline Lilly, Orlando Bloom and Cumberbatch, is still out in theatres now."
Disney's "Jungle Book" is set for an Oct. 9, 2015 release while that of Warner Bros.' will hit the theaters on Oct. 21, 2016.
