A Hell Of A Lot Went Into Creating Smaug

Did you know that The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug's titular dragon has a million scales? That's basically a metric shitton. He's also got Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch as his voice and motion capture actor, which we're gonna go out on a limb here and say is the best part of the movie. Every movie should have Cumberbatch playing a dragon — because then every movie might be so privileged as to boast him calling that dragon a "porn star" and wiggling around on the floor. And humanity just needs that, you know?

Playing a dragon can apparently get a bit salacious. Here's an anecdote Benedict shared a while back in an interview with the LA Times:

HC: Peter Jackson mentioned something about you rolling around on a bit of carpet…

BC: It was motion capture, so I did roll around a bit on the carpet. He’s talking about the dragon porn that happened a little bit later, in the sort of third installment of our work together… they built the platform in the main soundstage at the post-production facility down in Wellington and it was great. It was sort of above [the floor] so I had this kind of thing of superiority. They built a wooden platform on stilts and they had this hard board that they’d padded with some foam and mats and stuff and on top of that they put this sheepskin. It was literally like “Baum chicka baum baum,” me up on my Smaug-y platform. I was like, “This is cool, I can slink around like a porn star dragon.”

Now this featurette shows how some rather strange work can go into creating something really quite impressive. Enjoy!