"hints the dragon will make a fleeting appearance in the first film, most likely in the prologue, and will remain as liquid tongued as the book's memorable villain (he is a character not a monster)."

"The spiders will speak more as a psychic communication", adds Jackson of Mirkwood's nest of arachnids (now in film two). "Only Bilbo hears them."

"Talking of subtexts, the Great Goblin, portrayed by Barry Humphries (as in Dame Edna), comes partly based on Kim Jong-il, late, unbeloved Dark Lord of North Korea. Grotesque is the key word here: "He is a rather childish character who enjoys tormenting the dwarves," says Jackson of the ruler of a ramshackle mountain kingdom built on set and in the fathomless mainframes of Weta Digital. "The goblins are a rather putrid, mouldy race of people."

Both are in the book.

Radagast senses Mirkwood's decline into the pestilential. McCoy, with a gleeful gleam in his eye, reveals there is a scene in the second film "where the wizards are together, battling not each other but some other evil."

Now The Hobbit has expanded to a trilogy, his [Elrond's] scenes with The White Council at Dol Guldur, dark stronghold of this trilogy's mysterious antagonist, "The Necromancer," have been moved to second film The Desolation of Smaug.

"And who's going to be in that?!" Weaving exclaims. "I don't know whether Elrond is, whether I've got more to shoot because of that, whther I'm a part of that. I'm not in the book, but kind of everyone's involved in the book whilst not necessarily named specfically. So you could imagine that Elrond might be there in some way..."

...but also appears with the dwarves and Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins, and with Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, for which "they didn't even have to pay me." Given Radagast's connection to Saruman....we wonder if McCoy worked with Christopher Lee during his specially mounted, London-based mini-section of the shoot. McCoy says not, but may yet appear in one of the later films with him. The shift from two-parter to trilogy means he has more to shoot next year."I can't predict what will happen in the future," he says. "There are different beginnings and endings to shoot: all sorts of stuff. It's very exciting; none of us have any idea what it's actually going to look like. Peter works in such a way that you do an infinite variety of takes in an infinite variety of ways, so you won't know what your final performance was until you sit down and watch it."