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Interview with BRUCE HOPKINS
(Gamling, Lord of the Rings)
by The Ed.
photo: Pinkie's
Our special thanks go once again out to Bruce and the Comicon team who made this interview possible.
I actually didn't discover dancing until I was 22 years old. I was a trained physique teacher, physical education. So I loved moving and physical things. One of the girls at my PE school was a dancer. I went to see her in the dance company she was in, they were rehearsing and I was visiting her city, Wellington. When I visited they were rehearsing, and it just blew me away. My ultimate dream was to be a sportsman probably up to then. They were swiving to the music of Dave Brubeck, which I had never heard of before. I never heard Jazz before, up until then. They were getting paid for it, so I just asked: how do you do this? And because not many men were getting into dance, they said 'come along to a workshop', so I did the workshop, and then I moved to that city and was having three classes every day, washing dishes at night. After six months, they had an audition and I got into the company. So I did that eight years as a full-time professional dancer.
You did contemporary dance?
Yes. I did some ballet, not in this company, but two companies later, we also did a ballet class every day, so I became a reasonably proficient ballet dancer.
How did you get from dancing to acting?
My girlfriend used to be in the dance company with me, and one day she said 'I'm pregnant', and I didn't want to be touring around with the dance company, I wanted to be around the baby, so I stopped. I got talked into being in a musical (I'm not really much into musicals). It was "West Side Story", with the main theatre company in Auckland, New Zealand, a professional theatre company. So we did that, and it was a very successful season, and the director of the theatre company asked me if I would like to come and stay with the theatre company. So again, I just pretty much learned on the job, and was a full-time actor with that theatre company for two years, and then I started freelancing.
How did you "happen" to be on Lord of the Rings?
I did an audition. Not for the role of Gamling, it wasn't really any specific role, just a generic audition to be a baddie, guys more like the Uruk'hai. And then, about a year and a half later, I got a phone call asking if I was available. It was halfway through the shootings, March 2000, and within a week they flew me down to Wellington, tried out the make-up and then I started shooting. Initially, I was supposed to shoot for about six to seven days, that was the last week of Helm's Deep. They had already shot two months of Helm's Deep, they just brought me in for the last week because they realized that Theoden needed somebody with him. So I went down after a couple of days when Philippa Boyens came up to me and said they liked what I was doing, and that they would put me into some more scenes. So all over 2000 I shot about sixty days, and I did six days last year, for re-shoots of Return of the King, which is really cool.
What was your first impression, the first day you were on set?
I was like a little kid who was kind of in awe, really a little bit over-awed at just how huge it was, how massive, how many people. It was ten times the size of a normal film crew in New Zealand, and that was only one of the crews, they had five different film crews going around. And I was really - because they had already been shooting I didn't have time, and that's my only regret, because they didn't bring me in with a lot of build-up to it, I didn't get to work with Bob Anderson, but I would have loved the horse-riding training or the sword fighting training through these eighteen months. It was such a pleasure working on it. So the first day - it was a well-oiled machine. I really stayed back, I was watching Viggo and Bernard, I got really quiet because I was a little bit surprised about myself because I usually talk a lot, but I've been really quiet. But I knew a lot of crewmembers so I talked away with them. But when I was working, I wasn't coming up with ideas for Peter or anything. I wished I had been a lot more free, but I was so in awe, I was really like a little kid.
Did you think back then that the Lord of the Rings trilogy would become this big?
No. No, not at all. We knew, as far as the movie went, that we were part of something really special. Whether or not they did well on the box office was another thing, but you knew that it was going to be really special working on this. My role - I had no idea. It just kept growing, and that was a real pleasure. There was one day when I was driving back form the airport in Auckland to my home, having worked for a week, and my cellphone rang, saying 'Bruce, can we get you down to Wellington tonight? We need you tomorrow in Wellington. Can you go home, repack your bags and get back to Wellington?'. One time, they flew me to Wellington to do one day’s work, so I just took a bag over my shoulder. But by the end of that day’s work, it was 'Aw, Bruce, can we keep you tonight? We will need you tomorrow morning. We want to keep you in Wellington." That was cool - it turned out to be a week later when I went back home. So I had to buy new underpants and socks, because I had only what I was wearing. (laughs)
What was the most challenging aspect of your work on Lord of the Rings?
Horse-riding. Making the horse-riding look like you had no problems riding along swinging your sword in a group, and there are all the horses around you, and you had to make it look like you were a horse-rider, because the Rohirrim, you know, where at one with their horses. So those were the most challenging shots that I did. Especially one shot where you come over a hill, and you have 140 of us in a column, and I was on the right hand flank of Theoden and Hama is on the left hand flank and we had to stay in line. I had a big lance in my stirrup as well, so I only had one hand for my reins and that is called "neck reining" if you ride a horse like that. And the horse team told me before we did that shot: "Sorry man, but Charlie (the name of my horse) doesn't do neck reining", so I just had to hope that he would follow the other horses. And he did! A couple of times he drifted out a little bit, but it worked. Those were really challenging moments.
Looks like you and Charlie got along well...
Oh yes! Charlie was pretty good! He knew I wasn't a horse rider, but he would do what I asked him to do most of the time. A lot of the horses, by the end of the shift, got really tired, they were exhausted, so if you didn't know what you were doing and were a bit awkward they got sick of you very quickly. So sometimes the horse team had to get on the horse and bring it back into behaving. The horse riding was a big challenge for me.
Lord of the Rings has brought popularity not only for the leading actors, but for almost everybody else working on the movies as well, even including the extras. You have a rather large fan base by now. When did you first realize that your face was "all over the internet", and how did you feel about it?
It is kind of exciting to think for a Kiwi actor, because we are a very small country, we are right down at the end of the world, it's really hard to make a living as a freelance actor. Especially in my situation, I have three teenage children, so it's very stressful, financially. After the Fellowship, you saw how big these movies were gonna be, and when The Two Towers was coming out, it was when I first realized 'I have to actually make this work for myself,' nobody was coming to me: 'hey, let's go and promote you!' So I actually approached some women who were real drivers in the Hercules/Xena fanbase for Michael Hurst, back in New Zealand, and they said to me: get a website. So I got a website and that's when you started to realize - the first weeks on my website, getting thousands of visitors, especially when you had an article on TheOnering.net on your character and linked back to your website, thousands of hits. This was exciting. I have two purposes for coming to conventions: one is that I can earn some money, because as a Kiwi actor, you didn't become wealthy in these movies. But the second thing was to create an international profile for me as an actor, and that's my main driving force now, to keep trying to create that profile. And it's not that scary, with people on the phone or following me home. I understand that, but as far as security goes, if I see somebody who kinda looks at you really intensely and suddenly all through the day you see that they are still watching every move you make... I had no hassles. Part of it is how you treat it as well. So it hasn't caused any problems for me. People don't tend to recognize me without the beard and the wig. They look at my photos a couple of times and sort of think: "Ah, that's you!" It's kinda cool, because you're in character on the photo.
On most of my photos, I have a very stern look, and I hope that most of the time in my real life I don't have a stern look. (laughs)
Recommended link: The Official Bruce Hopkins Website
The New Zealand actor, originally a trained dancer, has become well?-known all around the world as Rohirrim "Gamling" in Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movie trilogy. But the likeable Kiwi is no newbie on the cinema and TV circuit: you have seen him in, among many other shows, "Hercules", "Xena: Warrior Princess" and "Young Hercules".