Battle of the Five Armies

Thomasin McKenzie has been on a number of sizable sets over the years including M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, David Michôd’s The King, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit and more, but you don’t really get much bigger than the set of a Hobbit movie.

McKenzie is now very well known for all those aforementioned titles, Leave No Trace, Last Night in Soho and more, but one of her very first feature film credits was actually The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. The movie had a reported production budget of $250 million and featured a slew of epic set pieces. McKenzie is credited as Astrid in the film, a young girl living in Lake-town, the location attacked by Smaug at the very beginning of the film.

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With Last Night in Soho now playing in theaters, McKenzie joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to retrace her steps in the industry thus far and took a moment to revisit being on a Hobbit set at such a young age, having only been on two far smaller sets prior. As one might expect, the scale of the production made a pretty big impression:

“It was just a huge production. It was filmed in Miramar in Wellington and for the longest time they had a huge green screen up and you couldn’t miss it when you drove through Miramar. It was massive. And just the sets that they made, especially, I can’t remember the name of the town that it was, but it was the river town that was at the base of the mountain … and it was so incredible, absolutely incredible to see a creation like that.”

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McKenzie also pinpointed a certain something that caught her eye on that set, something that inspired her to add a dream role to her bucket list:

“I was so young. I think when you’re that young you kind of take those things for granted. I think I was 11 maybe at the time, 11 or 12, and so the thing I remember most was sitting in the makeup chair and looking to my right and seeing multiple shelves filled with elf wigs, and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with playing an elf or a fairy or something where I could wear, very much like Anya [Taylor-Joy]’s hair, like a long platinum blonde straight wig. I think that would be so much fun.”

Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie in Last Night in Soho — Image via Focus Features

Given the fact that I’m a big believer McKenzie is one of the most promising young actors out there bound for very big things, I’m willing to bet that if she wants a role like that, she’ll get it eventually and make the absolute most out of it. While we wait for that to happen, why not revisit everything McKenzie has already accomplished? You can hear all about her time working on Leave No Trace, Last Night in Soho and more in our uncut Collider Ladies Night conversation below:

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