Peter Jackson Talks About Martin Freeman's Role as Bilbo Baggins in "The Hobbit"

Jackson had this to say:

"He is fantastic and there is simply nobody else for the job. We couldn’t find anyone who was better than him. He is simply fantastic.

I can’t imagine anyone else doing Bilbo, which is one of the reasons, really, we signed him up even with having the ‘Sherlock’ break — normally on a movie you wouldn’t want to do that with the schedule. But we literally couldn’t figure out any other actor and we auditioned, you know. There is no other actor.

He’s Bilbo-esque. You might not always want to say that about you, right? But seriously he has the essential features of this little English gent, this country gent who is slightly old-fashioned and has to go around in the world and try to cope with it. That’s not exactly who Martin is as a person, but as an actor he does that so well. The fish out of water with a sense of courage but also a wonderful sense of humor. The things that happen to him and the way he reacts to them — things he’s never seen in his life before as a stuffy little Hobbit — his response to it all is part of the charm. And he does have a great openness in his face.

We’ve been shooting a bit of the second ‘Hobbit’ movie because Martin, who is our Bilbo, is in England doing the next series of ‘Sherlock,’ which was always part of it. He had committed to that show before he signed up for ‘The Hobbit.’ And that’s one of the reasons we took a little break. We haven’t got much we can do without Martin because he is in so much of the film. So we took a hiatus, which let me come over here to do Comic-Con. So he’s been shooting ‘Sherlock’ and he’s got a few weeks to go, so there’s some stuff we can do for the second movie until he gets back. And when he gets back after two or three weeks we can carry on with the first one."