Thanks to EW, we have our first official looks at both Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Ian McKellen as Gandalf The Grey. You can also see some of the Dwarves in the background of the first pic. I can't be sure but I think the closet one in black might be Thorin? There are also quotes from director Peter Jackson under each pic..
"He fits the ears, and he's got some very nice feet", Jackson says of his Bilbo. "I think he's got the biggest hobbit feet we've had so far. They're a little bit hard to walk in, but he's managed to figure out the perfect hobbit gait."
''He's in fantastic form,'' Peter Jackson says of McKellan. ''In a way, his role in The Hobbit has more technical difficulties than Lord of the Rings did, because he has scenes with 14 smaller characters — obviously the dwarves and the hobbit are shorter... I remember saying to him [laughs], ''Look, this isn't Waiting for Godot or King Lear. This is The Hobbit. This is the real thing.''
''There's no way you can pace yourself for shoots like these,'' Jackson says. ''When we were going through the schedule for The Hobbit, I felt a terrible drop in my stomach when I saw that we'd be shooting for 254 days. We're only 12 days short of The Lord of the Rings even though we're only doing two movies. When I saw that, I had to sort of pick myself up off the floor and carry on.''
I think these are great. I was a bit worried about how Freeman would look as Bilbo, not anymore. Lets hope we start to see more from Jackson's prequel to what many consider(me included) to be the greatest movie trilogy of all time..and yes, I am counting the original
Star Wars movies.
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Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.