1. The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug is the only movie in Peter Jackson's Middle Earth series that does not feature Frodo, Gollum or Elrond, which means that Gandalf is the only character (and Ian McKellen the only actor) to appear in every single Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit film.
2. Stephen Colbert has a small cameo in The Desolation Of Smaug. He plays the eyepatch-wearing Lakewood Spy who knocks on the door with the walking stick...
3. As Legolas Orlando Bloom spends a lot of time staring off into the distance, and the only time he blinks is when he realizes he has been wounded. This is in keeping with the character and how he was written. In the original Lord Of The Rings trilogy the only time Legolas blinks is when he is strongly surprised.
4. Whilst we're on the subject of Legolas. Orlando Bloom is actually two years older than Lee Pace. The actor who plays his father, King Thranduil.
5. The insult Thorin screams in Dwarvish at Thranduil in Khuzdul translates roughly as "I dump my feces on your head." He's got such a way with words!
6. Talking about 'dumping'! The fish that were dumped into the barrels to hide Bilbo and the dwarves were actually real fish, with a few rubber props mixed in with them. At one point Adam Brown (who plays Ori) had 400 pounds of fish dumped directly on top of him! Made even worse by the fact that Brown suffers from ichthyophobia, which is phobia of fish!!
7. Back when Guillermo del Toro was signed up to direct The Hobbit, he had spoken with Ron Perlman about providing the voice of Smaug. I can totally hear that, I think he'd have been a great choice.
8. As we know, it was Benedict Cumberbatch who eventually signed up to voice Smaug. He also provided the voice of the Necromancer, and during the Black Speech scene it was actually Cumberbatch who suggested that the speech should be read backwards to make it sound more diabolic and unholy.
9. Most of the women who come out to see Bilbo and the dwarves leave Lake Town for Erebor are actually tall male crew members. They were dressed up as women so they could give the proper scale of humans to dwarves & Bilbo.
10. Peter Jackson has made a cameo in all the Middle Earth movies to date. Starting with The Fellowship Of The Ring where he played a carrot chomping resident of Bree, we then saw him as a Rohanian spear thrower, an arrow targeted pirate and a dragon fleeing dwarf. In The Desolation Of Smaug you can spot him at the beginning of the film reprising his Fellowship carrot chomping role - as the camera sweeps through the town of Bree, Jackson walks across the shot, turns to camera and takes a bit of a carrot. If you've ever wondered why a carrot, well he was supposed to be smoking a pipe in the original Fellowship cameo but on the day he was filming it he felt a little sick. So he picked up a carrot instead.
Read All Our Lord Of The Rings / The Hobbit Trivia Articles
The Actors Who Could've Been In The Lord Of The Rings
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10 things you may not know about The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
10 things you may not know about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
10 things you may not know about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Samug
10 things you may not know about The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
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