The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman (19 page)

On 12 July 2013 Peter Jackson wrote, ‘Tonight Martin Freeman finished his last shot as Bilbo Baggins… The end of an incredible two-and-a-half years. I cannot imagine anyone else in this role – a character that Martin has nurtured and crafted with love and great skill.

‘We have said goodbye to our elves, humans, wizards and now the hobbit. We now enter our final 2 weeks of pick-ups, and it’s wall-to-wall dwarves.

‘These pick-ups have been gruelling and intense, but I’m so happy with what we’ve been shooting. These next two movies are going to be pretty great!’

While Freeman will miss the cast and crew of
The Hobbit
, he won’t miss the rigmarole of putting on Bilbo’s costume. He had to shave his legs, and talcum-powder them for the flipper-like Hobbit feet. He put an inner-sole in the shoe then put a latex leg and foot over it to make him look like a hobbit. It was a two-person job that took around a fortnight to get used to. Shooting three movies back-to-back in another country while flying back home to work on
Sherlock
was hard work. It was eighteen months that required Freeman to be fit and healthy. Back in London there was a period of decompression; a feeling of returning to normality.

2013 was a productive year, not only with the release of
The World’s End
but also
Svengali
, in which he played Don, and he voiced the character of Bernard D. Elf in
Saving Santa
.

Svengali
is a British film about a postman from South Wales named Dixie (played by Jonny Owen) who is a music fanatic and dreams of discovering a great band to rival the best. One day while trawling through YouTube videos he stumbles across The Premature Congratulations. He tracks them down and offers to be their manager. He gets them to record a demo so he can shop it around the London record labels. The story follows Dixie’s journey around the London music industry. His partner is Michelle (played by Vicky McClure), who helps him
on his quest and he struggles to deal with egos and the general issues of band management. As the band’s success grows, his chances of continuing to manage them decrease. He is divided in his loyalties: a life as a band manager – something he has always dreamed of – or a life with Michelle. Directed by John Hardwick,
Svengali
had been screened at the sixty-seventh Edinburgh International Film Festival on 21 June 2013 and nominated for the Michael Powell Award, which honours best British feature films. It later had a UK release on 21 March 2014. The film has since all but disappeared from recent memory.

In a one out of five-star review in
The Guardian
, Jonathan Romney wrote, ‘With sparky prestige support (Martin Freeman, Maxine Peake, Matt Berry) and cameos from Alan McGee and Carl Barât,
Svengali
ought to be sharper, but this good-natured, clunky labour of love feels about as fresh as a 2002 copy of the
NME
.’

Total Film
’s Kevin Harley wrote, ‘Likeable casting can’t quite salvage director John Hardwick’s threadbare British pop comedy, under-developed from a web series… Martin Freeman’s grumpy shop-owner and several pop cameos (label maverick Alan McGee, The Libertines’ Carl Barat) play like sketch matter, better suited to this spread-thin project’s online origins.’

Freeman was presented with a fellowship by the members of University College Dublin’s Literary & Historical Society on 5 October 2013. The campus’s Fitzgerald Chamber was filled to capacity as students sat to listen to Martin give an engrossing talk about his successful career. He even posed for photos with guests and his framed accolade.

Saving Santa is a computer-animated comedy created and
written by Tony Nottage and directed by Leon Joosen. It’s about an elf who is the only one of Santa’s elves that can stop the invasion of the North Pole by using the secret of Santa’s sleigh, a TimeGlobe, to track back in time – twice – to save Santa. The film also stars Tim Curry, Joan Collins and Chris Barrie. It was released in the US on 5 November 2013 and went to DVD in the UK and has since faded into the mists of time.

Total Film
’s Neil Smith wrote, “‘Once something is done, it cannot be undone!” declares Father Christmas in
Saving Santa
, an amateurish cartoon that’ll have you fervently hoping the opposite.’

The Observer
’s Mark Kermode wrote, ‘That Martin Freeman and Tim Curry (both mighty in their own way) should lend their voices to this let-down is depressing enough; that Joan Collins and Ashley Tisdale have been roped in somehow makes it worse. On this evidence, Santa’s sadly not worth saving.’

It had been a year since the release of the first
Hobbit
film, so was Freeman prepared to enter the world of cult fandom and become an icon to millions?

‘There hasn’t actually been as much craziness as you would think, or at least as much as I was prepared for,’ he admitted to 3 News’s Kate Rodger. ‘There’s actually more
Sherlock
craziness in my life. Weirdly, I think it manifests itself more from
Sherlock
than it does from
Hobbit
people.
Hobbit
people have been very restrained, actually and the ones who are really on it are
Sherlock
folks. But yeah, people occasionally say ‘Bilbo’ when they see me. There’s a very broad appeal, age-wise, to
The Hobbit
. If a nineteen-year-old girl is coming up to me, that’ll be
Sherlock
. If it’s an eight-year-old boy, it’ll be
The Hobbit
.’

The
Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,
the eagerly awaited sequel to
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,
was premiered in LA on 2 December 2013 and released internationally on 11 December. The film follows the journey of Bilbo Baggins as he joins Thorin Oakenshield and his fellow dwarves on a quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug. Gandalf the Grey also investigates the evil forces at work at the ruins of Dol Guldur. The film features a stellar cast, joining Martin Freeman, including Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Ken Stott, James Nesbitt, Orlando Bloom and Luke Evans.

Freeman spoke to
Flicks And Bits
about Cumberbatch’s role in the film. The pair had both auditioned for their respective parts in London during the filming of
Sherlock
series one.

‘He did the whole physical performance of it in a performance capture suit and all that,’ Freeman explained, ‘but given that he’s not 200 ft tall and not the shape of a dragon, there’s only so much you can do with that. But he brought such a fantastic vocal quality to it, which he has a fantastic range with – especially that lower registry. He’s really good and very right for Smaug.’

Martin revealed that he never rehearsed with Cumberbatch for
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
. They were not even on the same continent.

‘We knew what we were doing,’ he said at a TV press interview. ‘When we came back for the second or third series of
Sherlock
, he’d be saying, “I’ve got to go back and do more bits of Smaug.” So, we knew what we were up to but never [in detail].’

‘It was great,’ Cumberbatch said to MTV News on working with Freeman on a different project other than
Sherlock
. ‘I got to hang out with him, and I kept a straight face for a bit and then I started giggling because I know Martin, I don’t know Bilbo. For Martin to be sitting there playing Bilbo is amazing. He’s going to be amazing, he’s going to be fantastic in this film.’

Bilbo is far more experienced by the second film and the process is gradual, which the audience are able to relate to. He’s not an action hero or a heroic icon but he has seen many things he had not previously witnessed and he’s come a long way since the journey began. He’d never even been in a fight but here he is on a major journey, coming across all manner of foes. He shows bravery and nobility that he probably wasn’t even aware he had.

Speaking about his character in the second film, Freeman told
Flicks And Bits
, ‘I really like Bilbo’s innocence, and I like playing the change from innocence to experience. I like that. So that he has a figurative journey, as well as the literal one as he goes on. Every actor wants to play different things or beats within a moment, or beats within a scene. You don’t want to be playing the same thing all of the time, and you certainly get that aspect of Bilbo, definitely in the second film. There’s a person there with more iron in his backbone, I guess. He’s just seen more, so his whole world view has shifted.’

Also, Bilbo is a flawed, slightly awkward and silly character. He’s certainly not your typical hero.

‘He is pompous and he is fairly small-minded,’ Freeman explained to
AsiaOne
. ‘So it’s not like he can be James Bond. And from Bilbo’s point of view, when he thinks he is being
really serious, actually the world is going, “Prat!” because he is puffing himself up in a classically English pompous way. It is funny. Pete was always asking me to do “that English thing”. I don’t really know what that is.’

Martin Freeman was now, in the eyes of the public, Bilbo Baggins. The actor had fully immersed himself in the role and was very comfortable.

‘Just the oddness of it, I think,’ Freeman admitted to
Stuff.co.nz
’s
Tom Cardy about the costume and prosthetics. ‘But I suppose by the first time I’d seen myself in the monitor, I was used to it. I’d had so many fittings, and I’d had so many pictures taken, and so many versions of the costume, and versions of the wig. But yeah, it felt kind of odd. I look fairly different as Bilbo, but what’s weird now, is it just doesn’t feel strange at all. And I genuinely forget – we all forget what we look like.’

The Hobbit
was originally slated to be a two-film project but a third feature was announced and so the second film was consequently renamed
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
. The screenplay was penned by Jackson with Fran Walsh, Philippa Bovens and Guillermo del Toro. It was shot in 3D with principal photography taking place in New Zealand and at England’s legendary Pinewood Studios. Additional filming was scheduled for May 2013 and lasted for approximately ten weeks.

Freeman was juggling Sherlock series three and the second
Hobbit
movie. It was a hectic period for the actor.

‘I always am around this time in the series,’ Freeman said to Mark Gatiss in a special feature in the
Radio Times
dated January 2014. ‘I think the schedules on this show are quite brutal –
The Hobbit
is a doddle, actually, comparatively. So
yeah, I’m quite tired, but I have to say I’m enjoying it. I have to say I’m enjoying it. It’s contractual!’

Freeman enjoyed the months spent filming in New Zealand but, of course, Wellington differs massively from the English capital. He certainly enjoyed the more laid-back, outside lifestyle of Wellington, though he loves London more than anywhere else in the world.

‘Wellington is a pretty small place,’ he told
AsiaOne
. ‘It’s easy. I mean, I love London more than anything else, but Wellington doesn’t have the stress about it. It just doesn’t. It would be impossible to be as stressed in Wellington as you are in London. If you are travelling fifteen minutes in Wellington then that’s quite a long journey. I was travelling six minutes to work each day. Could you imagine that in London?’

How did he cope being so far from home?

‘When you’re working for very long hours through the days and nights it’s easy not to look after yourself and not to eat and sleep properly,’ he expressed to the
Daily Mirror
’s John Hiscock. ‘So I had regular massages and without them I would have gone barmy.’

He continued, ‘I love my home and part of the reason I love it is that it’s private, so I don’t want to talk about it. It’s where I feel sane and where I feel safe, and I love it for that.’

Freeman especially enjoyed filming the fighting scenes with the Wargs, which are giant wolves kept by Orcs. Usually, however, those scenes involved the stunt team dressed in green-screen outfits carrying a head that Freeman had to stick a sword in, and the rest would be done with computer-generated imagery by the computer geeks.

‘This is the film where Bilbo becomes totally invaluable to the group – he’s not a mascot or someone to be patronised,’ Freeman told
Time Out London
’s Nick Aveling on the progression of his character. ‘In fact, he saves their arses on numerous occasions, so he’s really needed. He finds more character, more backbone, than he knew he had. I love Bilbo’s “plucky” side, but I’m also interested in when he has to get serious. In times of war, manners and politeness don’t mean too much.’

Despite the abundance of special effects, stunts and action sequences, the writers were shrewd enough to include those tender human moments that audiences can relate to.

‘… even though he [Peter Jackson] wants people to be able to escape into these worlds that he helps create, it is meaningless unless you cut back to what you really think or what you’re really feeling about this,’ Freeman expressed to James Rocchi of
MSN Entertainment
. ‘So it’s always the small bit I think. It’s always the devil’s in the details. And I think you need to kind of focus in on how is this person reacting to all this. That’s why I love Pete’s battles. The battles are never just about, “Yay, we’re all goring each other to death.” It’s actually, you know, you cut back to a child and the fact that the child is terrified or the fact that Thorin has just seen his father’s head cut off…’

The film had a major marketing campaign that dominated the entertainment media for much of the year. Jackson held a live event on 24 March 2013 in which he revealed some plot details and screened a scene from the film. The first trailer was released on 11 June 2013 and a longer trailer was shown on 4 November. A special live online fan event (hosted by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in New York) was staged across
eleven different cities on 4 November with Peter Jackson, Jed Brophy, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, Luke Evans, Andy Serkis and Richard Armitage. Freeman took part in the heavy marketing campaign by appearing on TV, radio and in various press events around the world.