FILM · 2013 · NEW ZEALAND
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
- Directed by
- Peter Jackson
- Runtime
- 161 min
- Studio
- New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, WingNut Films
106 archived facts 6 topics 1 source Last reviewed Sep 2026
The Dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf have successfully escaped the Misty Mountains, and Bilbo has gained the One Ring. They all continue their journey to get their gold back from the Dragon, Smaug.
Summary: TMDB
86 Interesting Facts About The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
- #001
Many of the women seen watching Bilbo and the Dwarves leave Lake-town for Erebor were actually tall male crew members, who dressed as women to achieve the correct scale against the humans, Dwarves and Bilbo during filming.
- #002
The Mirkwood scenes required removing almost all color from the image so the forest would look "sick." As a result, objects that had to keep their color, such as certain mushrooms and lichens, had to be painted in neon colors so they would be noticeable in the final film. Sir Peter Jackson said the set looked as if it had been painted in 1967. The actors also had to have their faces painted an unusually deep red to preserve color.
- #003
The only moment Legolas blinks is when he realizes he has been wounded and cuts off the head of the Orc Thranduil is interrogating. This is consistent with the character, since the only moment Legolas blinks in The Lord of the Rings trilogy is when he is very surprised.
- #004
While filming the barrel escape scenes in a specially built enclosed "rapids" tank, the actors said many of them had to urinate in the water because they were forced to stay in the tank for so long, sometimes without even a lunch break. Martin Freeman was very angry because Bilbo spent all of that scene directly in the water and swallowed a large amount of it.
- #006
Benedict Cumberbatch suggested that the Necromancer's Black Speech be written and read backwards, after which the editors reversed the recording so it would sound demonic and unholy.
- #007
The sudden scars on Thranduil's face are an invention of the film adaptation. However, the scars may reflect a somewhat emphasized aspect of J. R. R. Tolkien's lore: Elves' "Fëa" (a metaphysical concept similar to a "soul") can at times affect the "Hröa" (the bodily, physical body), especially in moments of extreme stress. This can manifest as extreme physical changes reflecting the state of the mind, in this case deep battle wounds. This fits J. R. R. Tolkien's texts and books, since the last battle Thranduil fought was the Last Alliance, at the end of the Second Age (roughly three thousand years earlier), in which Sauron was defeated.
- #008
Thranduil states openly that he does not consider Tauriel worthy of his son Legolas, but the film avoids explaining why. In the books, the Wood-elves of Mirkwood are identified as Silvan, while Thranduil and his family are Sindar ("Grey Elves"), a nobler ruling class of Elves. The film also touches on this difference through the fact that Thranduil and Legolas are blond while all the other Mirkwood Elves have darker hair (although Legolas's hair color is never stated in the books).
- #009
Bilbo steals the prison keys from an Elf named Elros. Elros is also the name of Elrond's brother. The two brothers had both human and Elven ancestry on their mother's and father's sides and were therefore fully half-Elf and half-human. Elrond chose to be an immortal Elf, while Elros chose to be a mortal human. He thus became the ancestor of the race of Númenor and of Aragorn.
- #010
Martin Freeman and the Elf actors all play characters who cannot grow beards. However, not only did the actors lack beards, but even if they were clean-shaven at the start of the day, a full five o'clock shadow appeared by the end of filming. This shadow appears blue on film. Instead of shaving repeatedly during the day, the actors applied an orange makeup that canceled out the blue shadow.
- #011
John Bell grew six inches between the completion of principal photography and the start of pickups. To maintain continuity, he had to stoop when standing next to Luke Evans.
- #012
Gloin suffers a great insult when the portrait of his bearded wife is mistaken for his brother. In the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), his son Gimli states that Dwarf women are often mistaken for men because of their beards.
- #013
Orlando Bloom performed all of his own stunts.
- #014
At the start of the film, as the camera moves through the town of Bree, a drunken man exits a bar and eats a carrot. There was a similar cameo in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Jackson also shot another cameo for this film. He played another spy, a man hiding in a basket in Lake-town who signals his companions with wild bird calls. The scene was strictly vetoed by co-producer and co-writer Philippa Boyens and was never used.
- #015
Orlando Bloom is two years older than Lee Pace, who plays his father, King Thranduil.
- #016
Richard Armitage hated the tan coat he was given as the Company traveled from Lake-town to Erebor and begged Sir Peter Jackson to find a way for him to lose it somehow. Jackson then wrote the scene in which Smaug unleashes a blast of fire at the Company, setting the back of Thorin's coat alight and requiring the coat to be removed.
- #017
When Bilbo first meets Smaug, he explains who he is using various aliases. He says he comes from "under hill," and Smaug responds, "Underhill?" This is the name Frodo Baggins uses to conceal his true identity in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) at Gandalf's request.
- #018
To prepare the voice of Smaug, Benedict Cumberbatch studied iguanas and Komodo dragons at the Reptile House of the London Zoo and aimed for a tone that would support "bridge between animal and human, a deep and rasping guttural dryness to the voice."
- #021
The fish thrown into the barrels to hide Bilbo and the Dwarves were real fish mixed with a few rubber props. At one point, roughly four hundred pounds of fish were dumped directly onto Adam Brown (Ori). Brown hates fish and had to contend with his own phobia while buried among the fish in the barrel, waiting for the crew to pull the fish off him. Because the fish were slippery, they had to be removed by hand one by one.
- #023
Creating a single scale on Smaug's body took one processor-week. That is, if a single computer processor were used, creating each scale would take one week. Fortunately, Weta Digital used a large server farm of multi-processor machines for the effects processing.
- #024
After the barrel-riding scene, as the Orcs continue searching for the Dwarves, one of them dips his finger into a pool of blood on the ground and tastes it, spits in disgust and says: "Dwarf blood!" This mirrors a scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) in which Gimli similarly dips his finger into blood left on some leaves and tastes it, but spits in disgust and says "Orc blood!"
- #025
In addition to providing Smaug's voice, Benedict Cumberbatch also provided a motion-capture performance to portray the dragon. However, because full motion capture of Smaug's body was impossible, only Cumberbatch's face, upper body and arms were captured, and the rest of the body was completed with keyframe animation.
- #028
When the group enters Beorn's house, Dori (Mark Hadlow) tells Ori (Adam Brown) to stay away from the door and says: "It's not natural. None of it." This is the same thing Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) says to Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) after descending on Elven rope.
- #029
The Silvan Elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) was created for the trilogy. Tauriel is a name meaning "Daughter of the Forest" in the Sindarin language.
- #030
The stone Kili carries is called labradorite, named after Labrador in Canada, where it was discovered. The Inuit people call it the "frozen fire of the Aurora Borealis" and consider it magical; this may be why Kili jokes about what might happen if someone touches it. Labradorite can appear black, gray-green, dark gray or grayish white, and in light it refracts colors such as blue, green, gold and red. You see these qualities as Tauriel examines the stone.
- #032
Bard's daughters Sigrid and Tilda are played by James Nesbitt's (Bofur) daughters Peggy Nesbitt and Mary Nesbitt.
- #033
Contains a major spoiler — show
When Kili is saved from the Morgul-tipped arrow by Tauriel, Kili sees Tauriel surrounded by light. In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Frodo, similarly wounded by a Morgul blade, also sees Arwen surrounded by light when he first sees her.
- #035
According to Benedict Cumberbatch, "I ripped into my vocal chords quite literally; I had blood at the end of the day from tearing my throat to pieces," in order to get Smaug's voice right.
- #037
As the scene of Bilbo examining the Ring cuts to Dol Guldur, the Black Speech is heard. It is the end of the spell Sauron had inscribed on the Ring when it was forged: "One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them."
- #038
At a midnight screening in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the cinema's speakers blew out after Smaug's first roar.
- #039
While fighting Bolg and the other Orcs in Lake-town, Legolas wields Thorin's sword ("Orcrist", the Goblin-cleaver), which he had hidden after disarming Thorin and the Dwarf company when they were captured in Mirkwood.
- #040
Lake-town is also called "Esgaroth" by the Dwarves and Elves. Esgaroth is a word meaning "bed of reed".
- #041
The conceptual designer appears as one of the musicians when some of the Dwarves and Bilbo leave Lake-town. He also appeared as one of the Nine Kings of Men in the opening scenes of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).
- #042
This is the only film in Sir Peter Jackson's Middle-earth series in which Frodo and Gollum do not appear. It is also the first of many Middle-earth films, including the animated films, in which Elrond does not appear. This leaves only Gandalf and Galadriel appearing in every film based on the Middle-earth series written by J. R. R. Tolkien, since Bilbo does not appear in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002).
- #043
The opening scene in which Gandalf meets Thorin at the Prancing Pony and sets him on the quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain does not appear in the novel "The Hobbit". It was first mentioned in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings novels and later retold in the "The Quest of Erebor" section of J. R. R. Tolkien's book "Unfinished Tales".
- #044
To prepare for the role of Tauriel, Evangeline Lilly trained in sword fighting and archery as well as in the Elvish language.
- #045
Lawrence Makoare (Bolg) played Lurtz, the leader of the Uruk-hai, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and the Witch-king of Angmar and the Orc leader Gothmog in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
- #046
Contains a major spoiler — show
When the Necromancer is revealed to be Sauron, he initially appears as an armored ghost, as shown in the prologue of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).
- #047
The Dwarves' capture by the giant spiders and then by the Mirkwood Elves is quite different from the book. In the book, Bilbo drives the spiders away with a song, and after the company escapes, Bilbo and the Dwarves chase the firelight toward open ground in order to reach the Elves. Each time, the fire is put out. This happens three times before the Dwarves are captured and imprisoned in Thranduil's dungeons.
- #048
Mirkwood is derived from the Germanic word "Myrkviðr" and means "Dark Wood".
- #049
When Benedict Cumberbatch was young, his father Timothy Carlton read "The Hobbit" to him as a bedtime treat.
- #050
The decision was made to use CGI for Azog, Bolg and the Orcs, and Bolg was decided on so suddenly that all the scenes had to be reshot; in the trailers the one chasing the Dwarves was Azog, but in the film it was Bolg.
- #052
Doug Jones was originally planned to play King Thranduil, but Sir Peter Jackson cast Lee Pace, of whom he had been a great fan since seeing Pace's film The Fall (2006).
- #053
The first meeting between Gandalf and Radagast takes place in the High Fells of Rhudaur, where they investigate an underground cavern. They see that the sanctity of some tombs has been violated and their iron doors blown open. These are the tombs of the Nazgûl (the ancient nine kings of men) that Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) mentions in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). Rhudaur is a Sindarin word (a fictional language created by Tolkien) and means "Eastern Forest".
- #054
While fighting a giant spider in Mirkwood with his sword, Bilbo hears the spider say "It stings, it stings." This gives the sword its name, which Bilbo will later give to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).
- #055
Sir Christopher Lee (Saruman) would have loved to voice the dragon Smaug in a film adaptation of The Hobbit.
- #056
Colbert appears as a Lake Town spy wearing a blindfold who knocks on the door with a staff. A longtime Tolkien fan and expert, Colbert brought his wife and two sons to the shoot. When the scene was finished, Peter Jackson personally presented Colbert with a replica of the sword Sting.
- #058
This film marks the first time Legolas bleeds on screen.
- #059
Luke Evans's (Bard the Bowman) performance was dedicated to Paul Walker, with whom he had appeared in Fast & Furious 6 (2013) and who died a few days before this film's release.
- #061
Smaug is one of the names regularly included in Forbes's "Richest fictional characters" list. According to Forbes writer Michael Noer, Smaug is the richest fictional character, with a hoard calculated to be worth more than 62 billion dollars.
- #062
Contains a major spoiler — show
In the Extended Edition of the film, Thorin searches for his father Thráin, who was lost during the battle between Dwarves and Orcs at the gates of Moria. Gandalf later finds Thráin in Dol Guldur; after years of torture and imprisonment he has lost his memory, and Gandalf discovers that the Necromancer is Sauron, who ultimately kills Thráin during their escape. In the novel The Hobbit, Thráin is already dead; much of his story was adapted not from the novel but from 'The History of Middle-earth' and the Appendices to the novel The Lord of the Rings. There are some major differences: in the books, after the battle with the Orcs, Thráin initially returned to his people and disappeared 46 years later, during an earlier attempt to retake Erebor; Gandalf actually found him five years later, 91 years before the events of The Hobbit, in Dol Guldur during a secret survey of the ruins. Thráin died of natural causes after giving Gandalf the key and map of Erebor, and was not imprisoned by Sauron. The Hobbit films significantly shortened the timeline of the books and moved Thráin's backstory so that it runs concurrently with the Dwarves' quest.
- #063
Beside the Elf King's throne is a pair of Megaloceros giganteus (Irish elk) antlers.
- #064
The runic writing inside the hidden door, read by Gloin, says: "Here lies the seventh kingdom of Durin's folk. May the Heart of the Mountain unite all Dwarves in defense of this home."
- #065
As Thorin stands before the colossal statue of one of his ancestors, he vows not to repeat his ancestors' mistakes, particularly regarding dragon sickness. The statue and Thorin share exactly the same profile, signaling that things may not go as desired for the heir of Durin.
- #066
In the original script, Bofur was to be part of the group accompanying Thorin and Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain. However, James Nesbitt had to return to the UK to work on another project, so the script was rewritten to fit his schedule.
- #067
Tauriel was not a character in the book and was created for the film by Peter Jackson.
- #068
Jed Brophy played Nori in The Hobbit trilogy. His son Sadwyn Brophy played Eldarion in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
- #071
While the novel and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) are mostly told from Bilbo's point of view, this film shifts the point of view mainly to Gandalf and Thorin, with Bilbo having very little involvement in many key scenes. Much of this material was adapted from the Appendices to the novel 'The Return of the King' and 'Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth' (particularly a section titled The Quest of Erebor).
- #072
While Guillermo del Toro was directing, he considered Ron Perlman for both Beorn and Smaug.
- #073
At one point, Bilbo and the company of Dwarves arrive at Lake-town, which an aging Bilbo (Sir Ian Holm) mentions to Frodo (Elijah Wood) in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) during their stay in Rivendell.
- #074
Thranduil (Lee Pace) is a Sindarin word meaning "vigorous spring."
- #075
Most notably, Smaug appeared to be a four-legged western dragon in the first film, but based on the description in the book, where he is referred to as a "Wyrm," he was redesigned in this film to be a more serpentine or bird-like Wyvern-type dragon. In the Blu-ray Extended Edition of the first film, his front legs were transformed into wing-arms. Many other parts of his body were also changed from his appearance in the first film.
- #077
The film's sound editors worked through the night to finish before delivering the sound, as they were behind schedule due to the plans suddenly changing from two films to three.
- #078
According to visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, classic European and Asian dragons (particularly the European Wyvern) were inspirations for Smaug's design.
- #079
In the original script, Tauriel healed one of Bard's daughters (most likely Tilda), but when reshoots took place, this was changed to Kili, which, combined with the aforementioned Bolg key, suddenly explained that Kili had been struck by an arrow.
- #080
Robert Kazinsky was cast as Fili and had shot several scenes, but he left the project for personal reasons and returned to England about a month after filming began. He was replaced by Dean O'Gorman.
- #081
Sir Peter Jackson, who hates fish, took a perverse pleasure in burying his actors under real dead fish.
- #082
Evangeline Lilly has been a fan of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth novels since she was thirteen years old.
- #083
This is the only J. R. R. Tolkien film adapted by Sir Peter Jackson that does not contain the "Wilhelm scream," something that had become a trademark for him. In November 2014, the Extended Edition included two scenes in which the "Wilhelm scream" was used.
- #084
Contains a major spoiler — show
Gandalf finding the ancient tombs in the High Hills of Rhudaur where the Nazgûl are imprisoned is an invention of the film. Nowhere in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings novels, or in any official work about Middle-earth, is it stated that the Nazgûl were killed and buried; they fled and hid instead.
- #086
Benedict Cumberbatch, Orlando Bloom, Cate Blanchett, Martin Freeman, Lee Pace and Richard Armitage were chosen by Empire Magazine readers among "The 100 Sexiest Movie Stars" in 2013.
- #087
In the "Barrels out of Bond" sequence, there are two instances of Thorin throwing a sword at Orcs to kill them; the first is to protect Balin when an Orc leaps down at him from above, and the second is to stop an Orc from attacking Legolas from behind. If you pause the film at these moments, you can see that in both cases the sword he throws has the same design as Balin's sword, which he used in both films until it was taken from him when they were captured in the forest by the Woodland Elves.
- #088
According to Weta's designers, Smaug's fire is not magical but "fuel-based."
- #089
Saoirse Ronan was offered another Woodland Elf role named Itaril (which may or may not have been Tauriel's original name), but she turned down the offer because she felt she could not commit to such a long shoot.
- #092
Hobbits are seen working and resting at The Prancing Pony inn in Bree; in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo & Co. are the only hobbits seen, despite the inn having hobbit-sized accommodations.
- #093
Some shots in the film were captured using unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.
- #094
Smaug appears to have a will to dominate, as shown by his ability to force Bilbo to reveal himself.
- #097
The meals at the Prancing Pony Inn consist of plates of bread along with a few tomatoes and a slice of cheese. The server serves Thorin and Gandalf this way when they meet there.
- #098
Even critics who hated the film felt it was worth watching just to see Smaug. Some regulars on internet forums even said that anyone not planning to see The Desolation of Smaug should reconsider, if only to see the earlier trailer for Godzilla (2014).
- #099
Ronan Keating was considered to play Bard.
- #100
When kingsfoil is needed to treat Kili, Bard says it is a weed fed to pigs. An visibly delighted Bofur (James Nesbitt) says "pigs - right!" and runs off to get some. Nesbitt played the pig farmer Pig Finn in Waking Ned Devine.
- #101
A group of heroes sets out toward some ruins to rescue a grey old wizard who has been captured by evil forces and left hanging from a gallows. Gandalf's capture probably also made him smirk in The Return of the King, when Theoden demanded that Saruman be "hanged from a gallows for the sport of his own crows."
- #102
Richard Armitage (Thorin) shares his name with Sir Stephen Fry's (the Master of Lake-town) first theatre agent, Richard Armitage (1928-1986), though the two are not related. The elder Armitage, son of songwriter Noel Gay, asked Stephen Fry, then only twenty-six years old, to write the book for the 1984 revival of his father's musical "Me and My Girl," which enabled Fry to buy the house in London where he still lives.
- #103
Richard Armitage played Francis Dolarhyde, also known as "Red Dragon," in the series Hannibal.
- #104
With this film, the global box office gross of the Middle-earth series surpassed 4 billion dollars.
- #105
For the scene in which Dwalin strikes the stone wall while trying to find the entrance to the Lonely Mountain, Sir Peter Jackson told Graham McTavish, "just set about the door… just go for it." McTavish hit the wall so hard that he "couldn't really make a fist for some time after that. It was a pretty stupid thing to do."
- #106
Two identical sets were built for Bard's house. One was about 30% larger so that the dwarf actors would appear smaller.
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