Benedict Cumberbatch Might Be the Best Actor Ever

I'm sitting on my couch, watching the last hour or so of Desolation of Smaug.  I love this silly movie; I probably rent it from the library or borrow it off friends once every two months or so.  In particular, I love the conversation between Bilbo and Smaug, deep under the Lonely Mountain just before Smaug breaks free and heads for Lake Town.  Even when the rest of the movie(s) didn't live up to my expectations, this conversation is eerie and dark and spine-tingling every time -- exactly as I pictured it years before when I first read The Hobbit.

It is surprisingly hard to find a good picture of this conversation online -- lots of fan art and old animation

Their conversation is just starting to heat up -- Smaug has started his "My claws are daggers" speech, that deep rumbling bass voice stirring into anger -- when Bishop's friend joins me.

"Did you know," he says, "that Benedict Cumberbatch did motion capture stuff for Smaug?"
I'm a little surprised at this. "Like Gollum?"
"Yeah! But... he's a dragon. So why did they need the motion capture?"  We debate this for a while, finally settling on the fact that a) Benedict Cumberbatch tends to move his face a lot, and b) so does Smaug. Particularly his dragon-eyebrows.  That's got to be the reason for it.

Of course, my next stop is the Internet, where I quickly discover that not only did Cumberbatch do this, he apparently spent roughly 3 or 4 days doing the motion capture, complete with dialogue and rolling around on the floor.  Observe:

There are websites out there devoted to all the gifs from this event!

This is seriously the best thing I've discovered on the Internet in a long time. 

 The interviews I read and watched all convey the same idea: Cumberbatch really wanted to get into character, and the CGI masters who created Smaug wanted some rough ideas for realistic movement.  Put them together and you get not only Smaug, but also the most amazing and hilarious images of a man truly devoted to his craft.

Some of the pictures, like this one, are decidedly psychotic -- and that, to me, gives Smaug's variation in emotions so much depth.  He's already a well-written character, thanks to Peter Jackson staying fairly close to Tolkien's original creation, and being voiced by someone as talented and involved and really okay with putting himself out there as Cumberbatch truly brings the character to life.  I mean, I'm a little scared of him as I watch some of those scenes, and I think that's exactly what Tolkien was going for.

It's obviously not a perfect match -- one of the CGI guys talks about how the differences in physiology between dragons and humans make using motion capture a little irrelevant. But it doesn't change just how cool this is -- and how much more real it makes Smaug feel.

As always, I am looking forward to whatever Benedict Cumberbatch does next. And to The Battle of Five Armies (trailer here), of course.

As if I really needed another reason to love him...