Bret McKenzie, one half of the Flight of the Conchords duo, has joined Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which started shooting over in New Zealand on 21st March, Variety are reporting.
Though it may come as news to some, McKenzie did actually have brief roles in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, the first and third of the original Lord of the Rings films (I’ve included a picture below, just in case you don’t believe me), playing a character nicknamed by the fans ‘Figwit’.
For The Hobbit, his character has been given a name: Lindir. Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I’ve read The Hobbit, so I can’t remember how Lindir relates to the overall plot. The character is an elf from Rivendell, who (according to Wikipedia), listens to Bilbo’s poetry, so it’s a fair assumption to predict McKenzie’s role will be a comic, light-hearted one.
McKenzie and fellow bandmate Jemaine Clement (who will be starring in Men In Black III) started Flight of the Conchords back in ’98. That led to their own radio series on BBC Radio 2 in 2004, and then two brilliant seasons of their HBO TV series, all under the same Flight of the Conchords name.
The Hobbit, which will see Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, his biggest role to date, is going to be released in two parts, with the first part expecting to come out towards the end of next year, and the second part about a year later, at the end of 2013. Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, and Elijah Wood are all confirmed to reprise their original roles.
We posted the first couple of pictures from the set a couple of weeks ago, and they look every bit as promising as expected. So though there’s still a bit of a while to wait, we can at least expect an excellent pay-off at the end of it all.
