STACK #126 Apr 2016

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with LUKE EVANS

Is Bard the hero in this final film?

and feel like it’s the soundtrack to your moment. Even though it’s not the music of the film – Howard Shore was still writing at that point – it still helped. Very rousing, heavy stuff.

LUKE EVANS: Yeah. He does heroic things, as

do many of the other characters in the film. He’s a fascinating character. He’s the human storyline. He’s forced to make decisions to fight for what he believes in, and he ends up doing something incredibly heroic that I don’t think even he believed he could do himself. It’s quite fun to think that this historical enemy of the humans and Dwarves and everybody else comes down to one Dragon and one man. It’s a journey of self-discovery for him and digging it out from somewhere he didn’t know he could find it. He’s a good man. Did you ever get to meet Benedict Cumberbatch, when he was acting out the Dragon?

Were you shooting scenes from the second and third films in the trilogy

somewhere covered in dots. I had my own idea of what he looked like.

simultaneously? Yeah. Let me tell you now: the scene in the third film, near the beginning, was my first day. Peter knows where he is, and explains to you where you are – that’s how it works. If you have a little question or you’re not entirely sure where you are, then he’s there to answer those questions. He’s been living with this story for a hell of a long time, longer than anyone else. So he’s had to answer those questions. I kept going to his blogs on the internet because it’s such a brilliant insight into how these things are created and how you process how you’re going to shoot certain

Was there a stand-in for Smaug while you were on set? Nope. It was me up a bell-tower, surrounded by cameras and cranes, but nothing else. But Peter [Jackson] played amazing, orchestral, rousing music that filled this big sound-stage, and it really worked. Lots of actors, they play music before they play an emotional scene. It gets them in the mood. Or there’s a certain song that gets them emotional. I don’t have any of that. But I did realise how clever that tool is, while I was acting, to be able to have music

No, because it was all CGI – so he would’ve been rolling round a carpet

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