This role ‘suits’ Cumberbatch

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, who plays the giant dragon Smaug in “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies,” didn’t feel like a fear some beast the first time he walked onto the performance capture set.

He felt like “a gray sausage with dots on it” in his ridiculously tight gray Lycra performance-capture suit pocked by reflectors.

“You just treat it as a normal day in an office, even though your face is painted like a mathematically correct aboriginal and you’re covered in this gray material like some sort of amorphous blob,” Cumberbatch told the Daily News. “You look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘What have I reduced my self to? ’And then you go out andy to? Andthen you go out and completely lose yourself in the joy.”

That outfit and those dots have a purpose: the reflectors are the points on the body that are picked up by dozens of cameras lining the “volume” where the scene is being shot. Inside that area, an actor’s movements are fed into a computer program that plots out a 3-dimensional figure mirroring the motion.

Cumberbatch’s computer data was eventually used by the programmers at Weta Digital to render the final animated character.

Four-time Academy Award winner Joe Leterri, who head sup the special effects house, says because Cumberbatch isn’t shaped like a dragon, most of the data couldn’t be used in the final look of the dragon — but it sure helped to get the animators inside Smaug’s head.

“By having Benedict on a stage in a performance-capture suit, Peter could direct him as full performance,” says Letteri. “It helped us to start to get a sense of his inner character.”

By the end of the experience on the Hobbit movies, Cumberbatch was enough of a convert to sign up for another performance capture role in director Andy Serkis’ “Jungle Book.”

“It freed me to be a complete child,” says Cumber batch. “My imagination wasthe only limit.”

Ethan Sacks