Benedict Cumberbatch, the new “Star Trek 2” villain and BBC’s “Sherlock Holmes,” may have inadvertently revealed how director Peter Jackson will bridge the gap between the ending of “The Hobbit” and the start of “The Lord of the Rings.”
The rising actor revealed some interesting things in a recent interview with Empire Magazine when they visited him on set during a shooting of “Sherlock.”
In the interview, Cumberbatch revealed how he’s playing two characters in “The Hobbit,”: one, the dragon Smaug, who he’ll play via motion capture and do voice over for, and the other, the Necromancer, who is actually a pre-LoTR Sauron.
Here’s what he had to say about them:
I’m playing Smaug through motion-capture and voicing the Necromancer, which is a character in the Five Legions War or something which I’m meant to understand. He’s not actually in the original Hobbit. It’s something [Peter Jackson]‘s taken from Lord Of The Rings that he wants to put in there.
Based on this, Empire Magazine assumes that what the 35-year-old actor is actually referring to the Battle of Five Armies, which will take place in the second Hobbit movie, “There and Back Again,” and has come up with this interesting theory about how Jackson intends to alter the original timeline in order to make “The Hobbit” and “LOTR” fit together more seamlessly:
Readers will know that the Necromancer is Sauron, and that Gandalf disappears halfway through (the book of) The Hobbit to lead a coalition force and drive the Necromancer out of his Mirkwood stronghold. But in the book they dispatch the Necromancer back to (as it turns out) Mordor well before the Battle of Five Armies. Here, however, it looks like he’s going to turn up to the finale in person, presumably at the head of the goblin and warg army, and face Gandalf’s team there.
This is actually pretty genius for two reasons. Not only does it help pad the Hobbit trilogy, but it also set it up perfectly as a LOTR prequel, by having Sauron as the final character.
“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” will hit theaters December 14th, 2012. Meanwhile, “The Hobbit: There and Back Again,” will be released the following year, on Dec. 13, 2013.