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It starts with their clothes. "Tummies changed," says Bob Buck, the movie's costume designer. "We built shoulders out, we built their legs out, we built their bums out. Everything is all distorted and manipulated to become a different sort of form." Waistlines were lowered. The actors were issued giant boots, which not only made their feet bigger but also forced them to walk differently. More dwarfishly.
In fact, although it's not obvious onscreen, the actors playing dwarfs are almost entirely covered in prosthetics. Their heads are enlarged with latex. Their arms are sheathed in latex sleeves ending in sausage-fingered latex gloves--each actor has multiple hands and arms lined up on metal racks, carefully labeled, to the point where the set looks like a Civil War--era field hospital. Viewed close-up, the arms are works of art: the skin is painstakingly mottled and scarred and scabbed and in some cases (Dwalin's in particular) even tattooed. There's dirt worked into the lines on the palms. Each arm is carefully furred with dwarf hair.
Speaking of which: there is almost no natural hair in The Hobbit. It's not just the dwarfs--every single character is wearing a wig. "Middle-earth is very hairy," says Peter King, who designed the hair and makeup. In the novel the dwarfs have multicolored beards, which they keep tucked into their belts. King hasn't gone that far, but his dwarfs do have extremely elaborate hairdos and beards. That takes a lot of hair, so King used yak hair instead of human. "Yak is quite coarse," he explains. "It's very crinkly, so it's a great way of bulking things up very quickly, especially for facial hair and big beards."
Once they were clothed and coiffed, the actors attended a dwarf-movement clinic with a former Cirque du Soleil performer who told them to imagine they had cannonballs in their guts. "It's not just about being shorter," says Richard Armitage, who plays Thorin Oakenshield, king of the dwarfs, and who in real life is 6 ft. 2 in. (188 cm) tall. "I use the bison as an animal idea of it: that big heavy upper body, that powerful stampede thing. It's a sense of being very grounded. It's also an emotional thing for the dwarfs. They're heavy in their souls as well as their bodies."
Being a dwarf requires a certain amount of Zen. Summer shoots were so hot that electric cooling units had to be sewn into the costumes. "We are, if you like, encased in dwarfdom," says Mark Hadlow, who plays Dori. "You can struggle with the prosthetics and the beard and the mask, the weight of the clothing, the weight of the weapons, the weight of the shoes. But if you accept it, inwardly--then it's so easy to play a dwarf."
Though being a Hobbit is easier. it's mostly about ears, feet and regular old acting. If dwarfs are bison, then Bilbo, according to Freeman, is a meerkat. "Pete always thinks I'm very hobbity," he says, "and I don't really want to argue about it, but I don't really know why. I'm a bit bolder than Bilbo, to be fair. I'm not quite as reticent about everything as he is."