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THE HOBBIT STAR ADAM BROWN'S UNEXPECTED JOURNEY
Sunday December 2,2012
By Henry Fitzherbert
THIS TIME two years ago Adam Brown was playing King Frog in Christmas panto Sleeping Beauty at the Newbury Corn Exchange, his fourth Christmas show on the trot. This year he is starring in a £300million global blockbuster, hanging out with new best friends Sir Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman and treading the red carpet.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is a film that could not be more apt for the chirpy, unassuming performer from Hungerford who, blinking and disbelieving, has been dropped into the biggest movie franchise of modern times.
“It’s like I have been thrown into a completely different world, it is surreal!” says Adam, 32, over a cup of coffee in a London hotel, a day before flying out to New Zealand for the film’s world premiere this week.
As one half of stage double act Plested and Brown (Clare Plested is his best friend and cohort from Middlesex University) he had never acted in a TV drama let alone a movie before landing the role of Ori the dwarf in director Peter Jackson’s eagerly awaited trilogy.
In fact, his only on-screen credit in his entire career thus far was a walk-on part in CBBC series Chucklevision. When his agent called telling him he had an audition for The Hobbit he assumed it was for a stage production.
“I was in the middle of rehearsing for the Edinburgh Festival, which I had performed at for 10 years, and I told my agent: ‘I can’t audition, I’m touring’. Then he explained it was for the Hobbit movie.”
Not only that, it was for the lead role of Bilbo Baggins. This was at the time when Martin Freeman was thought to be unable to play the role because of his commitments shooting the BBC’s Sherlock and the filmmakers were, says Adam, “casting their net wide, very wide”.
At his audition, the exuberant Adam so impressed the casting agents (“I had fun”) that he was told afterwards he was in the running to play a dwarf. “I did not really know what a dwarf was because I could not remember the book,” says Adam who took the good news in his stride.
In fact, that same week he had auditioned for a role in BBC sitcom Miranda and, as an avowed sitcom buff, he was rather more excited about that. “My heart has always been in BBC sitcoms, I am really old school,” he laughs, citing Victoria Wood and Ronnie Barker as particular favourites.
Miranda snubbed him but Peter Jackson came calling. Two months later as he was driving along London’s North Circular Road in pouring rain, having just attended the press launch for Sleeping Beauty, his agent called and told him he had landed the plum role of Ori, youngest of the 13 dwarves who accompany Baggins on his adventure.
“I was told that I would be flying out to New Zealand 10 days after the panto finished, it was complete madness,” recalls Adam, who grew up in Hungerford, the son of a washing machine repair man.
So last January Adam found himself flying out for the 18-month shoot (all three Hobbit movies were being shot back-to-back). “One minute I was screaming ‘this is amazing, I can’t believe it’, the next I was crying ‘It’s too much, I can’t cope’,” says Adam, who was convinced they had “got the wrong person”. It was only when he met Jackson and his collaborators for the first time, at a welcome barbecue in Jackson’s Wellington home, that Adam started to relax.
“I was bricking it but everyone was so friendly, it was like a big family.”
The family atmosphere extended to the cast’s living arrangements, with everyone put up in a house along the peninsula of Wellington; an area owned pretty much wholesale by Jackson who has transformed New Zealand single-handedly into a movie-making mecca.
“It was like Wisteria Lane in Desperate Housewives,” says Adam, who had James Nesbitt for a neighbour on one side and Orlando Bloom on the other.
The latter, reprising his role as Legolas from the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, arrived part way through the shoot and met Adam as he was hanging up his washing in the garden.
“I was pegging out my washing and he said: ‘Hello mate, you not at work today?’ I was in a world of my own and screamed when I saw him and dropped all the pegs.”
Adam was often a dinner guest of Nesbitt, a fellow dwarf who had his family out with him, but it was Martin Freeman with whom he became closest.
We became really good friends and I have seen him a lot in London,” says Adam. “We both moaned there was nowhere to go shopping in Wellington and we both like our music.” Sir Ian McKellen, too, became a good pal, and when an in absentia Adam was asked to record a voiceover for last year’s Christmas panto in Newbury the legendary Shakespearean actor joined in.
“I was recording it on my iPad on location and Ian was dressed as Gandalf and asked to take part. I wrote a little speech for him and sent it off to the theatre. They were over the moon.”
If the engaging Brown is now at ease with his glamorous new life his parents are still coming to terms with it.
“They came out to New Zealand last Christmas and we were invited to the Jacksons’ house for drinks on Christmas Eve,” says Adam. “My dad is a big Lord Of The Rings fan and he was almost bowing to Peter Jackson.”
However, his mother, a receptionist, was less starry-eyed. “I think she would be far more excited if I was in EastEnders” chuckles Adam.
Indeed, when Adam suggested booking tickets for the family to see The Hobbit on its opening night on December 13, his mother had other ideas.
“She said: ‘They are turning on the Christmas lights in Hungerford on December 13th. Shall we do the 14th?”
Adam laughs infectiously. No, there is no danger of this particular dwarf getting any ideas above his station.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be at cinemas from December 13
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While we didn't see much of him in the first movie, he sure did leave a good impression with me 
