'Hobbit' star Armitage finds a wee bit of fame

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Five questions for The Hobbit's Richard Armitage Five questions for Richard Armitage, star of "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey."

Special leather and fur shoes helped bring Armitage down to size for the role

He starred in a stage production of 'The Hobbit' as a child

He's best known in Britain, where he's a regular on BBC TV series

His boots were made for walkin' — across Middle-earth.

In Richard Armitage's case, the shoes indeed make the dwarf in director Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. For a span of 240 production days that wrapped up this past summer, Armitage trudged around New Zealand in his unique footwear while filming the just-opened movie and two more Hobbit chapters: next year's Desolation of Smaug and 2014's There and Back Again.

The 6-foot-2 British actor plays Thorin Oakenshield, a dwarf warrior on a quest to take his land back from the evil dragon Smaug. And thanks to some movie magic, Oakenshield is a full foot shorter than the guy playing him.

Armitage liked his boots so much, he jokes that they'll soon take the fashion world by storm. "They are the most funky things you've ever seen," Armitage says of his gear, made of leather and fur and featuring a three-inch steel toe cap.

"You had to learn how to run with effectively what felt like concrete blocks on your feet. You had to make that look natural."

Orlando Bloom wore elf ears for his breakthrough role in Jackson's The Lord of the Rings series, and the Hobbit footwear may do the same for Armitage, who could pass for a blue-eyed James Bond underneath all of Thorin's facial prosthetics and hair.

"When we knew he was the guy we wanted, I was worried that he was going to have a hesitation about playing a dwarf," says Hobbit writer-producer Philippa Boyens. "But he didn't at all. He got it."

In The Hobbit, Thorin and his people are exiled from their home on the Lonely Mountain when Smaug attacks and takes their treasure, including the rare Arkenstone. He leads a company of dwarves on an adventure to reclaim their land with the help of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman).

Armitage, 41, was the youngest man producers auditioned for the role of Thorin, since the character in J.R.R. Tolkien's book is much older — and a lot shorter — than the actor. However, Jackson needed a Thorin who could be a fierce warrior as well as a king, Armitage says.

He tapped first into Thorin's nobility and pride — "I have a bit of pride, which is always my downfall" — but Armitage was also interested in a character who was a leader but at his heart had a deep-rooted anxiety of failure.

"He's a legendary warrior, but he fears that dragon. He knows what's in the mountain. He fears the dragon's sickness," the actor says.

"He isn't king yet, he may never be king, but he has to take on that status of 'I can be your king.' But inside of him is this absolute fear that he's not going to be capable of doing it."

Thorin isn't Armitage's first Hobbit role — when he was 11, the Leicester native read the book for the first time and played an elf in "a relatively low-budget stage production. Gollum was made of paper and the dragon was a light and a puff of smoke."

He feels that first exploration fed his imagination, which led to reading The Lord of the Rings. At age 17, joined a circus in Budapest for six weeks in order to get an equity card and become a professional actor.

"That was one of those jobs that required stamina," says Armitage, who would throw hula hoops and batons as part of the physical-theater group. "Whatever I lack in talent I have in stamina."

It came in handy for those long days in Thorin's trademark footwear.

"The boots give you a way of moving," Armitage says. "There were times where they said, 'You don't need to wear the boots for this scene because it's only a mid-shot,' and I was like, 'I can't do this character without the boots on.' "

Boyens was excited that Armitage could sing, a boon for the dwarves' plainsong tune that helped the actor start every day of filming. But even more important for her was that Armitage, like Thorin, exuded decency, strength and goodness, but with a slight dark obsession underneath.

"There's a self-awareness of it, too, which is really interesting because that's also the character," Boyens says. "He's got real depth, genuinely, as an actor. He's just going to keep getting better and better."

Other than a small role as a Nazi villain in last year's Captain America: The First Avenger, Armitage's face is mainly known in Britain for his roles on the British shows Robin Hood and MI-5.

However, he's pleased that three Hobbit movies could potentially let him show more movie fans the man who makes the dwarf.

"It's exciting to know they'll see a side of my work that's new to me as well," says Armitage, who stars in next year's tornado thriller Black Sky.

"I love it when people are surprised and they're like, 'Oh, it's you who plays that little 5-foot-2 hairy guy.' "