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.