$1.6m worth of make up goes into making `The Hobbit` dwarf

Melbourne: To make a man look like a dwarf, it takes three hours in the make-up chair, ten test faces, a wig, a beard, some body padding, eight weeks of dwarf -walk training and 1.6 million dollars worth of prosthetics.

Richard Armitage, who plays Thorin Oakenshield in the JRR Tolkien/ Peter Jackson-adapted ` The Hobbit`, revealed to a website the lengths it took to transform him into the King Under The Mountain. "Well it`s my beard, which I`m growing back in time for the next lot of filming, the hair is a wig which strangely a lot of people don`t realise, but the forehead the eyebrows and the nose are all prosthetics," he said. He said that it takes about three hours to get ready - about an hour and a half for the face and 45 minutes for the hair. If they started shooting at eight o`clock they would have to be in the chair at 4.30am. ANI