WHEN Kiwi filmmaker Peter Jackson was considering actors to play the malevolent and morbidly obese Great Goblin in his adaptation of JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit, he said it seemed obvious the role should go to an Australian. “The character is very uncouth, has very bad personal hygiene issues, its vocabulary is quite small, so it seemed it had to be (someone) from Australia,” Jackson joked ahead of the film’s premiere last night in the New Zealand capital, Wellington. The director might have been playing to a home audience with the good-natured gibe, but the man who seized the role magnificently, actor Barry Humphries, took the shot with typical aplomb. “I brought a healthy Australian vulgarity to (the role),” Humphries said. (Co-star Cate Blanchett joked that the “goitre” swinging from his character’s neck, courtesy of computer-drawn motion-capture technology, was the most terrifying thing about the film.) Humphries – who brought Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna Everage to life – quipped: “I always thought motion capture was something you did when taking a specimen to the doctor.” Jackson was knighted in 2010 after the phenomenal success of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, the biggest film project ever undertaken, at a cost of $285 million. Last night almost the entire cast attended the Wellington premiere. The film is the first of three episodes in the dramatisation of Tolkein’s 1937 prequel to his Rings saga. Tens of thousands of Tolkein fans lined both sides of a 500m red carpet towards Wellington’s historic Embassy Theatre, with a free concert to welcome them from Neil Finn, who sings the film’s theme, Song of the Lonely Mountain. The sumptuous production stars Briton Martin Freeman in the lead role of Bilbo Baggins, the stay-at-home hobbit coaxed out of his domesticity by the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and 13 elves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage). Andy Serkis is back as Gollum, Hugo Weaving returns as the elf king and Blanchett’s Galadriel also plays a part, in one of a handful of scenes not in Tolkein’s original but designed to make more explicit the story’s link with the Rings saga. Tolkein wrote The Hobbit as a children’s tale, and his much darker Rings trilogy 20 years later. The difference in tone between the two carries through to Jackson’s interpretation, though some viewers might find The Hobbit more disturbing than they remember from the book. Blanchett said her two young sons had accompanied her from Sydney for the eight days she spent on the set, and insisted “definitely I’d take (them) to see the film” despite its occasional violent moments. The Hobbit was shot in high-definition 3D, with cameras operating at 48 frames per second rather than the industry standard 24 frames. This gives the film a realistic feel. It opens in Australia on December 26.