Irish actor James Nesbitt, cast in the role of the Dwarf Bofur, spoke with the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show on Absolute Radio this morning about the time he’s spent so far in New Zealand, reports BeeHiveCity and ContactMusic.com.

From BeeHiveCity:

“We’ve been here for training, because I’m going to be here for a year so the amount of work and the work we’ll be getting up to means we all have to be fit, you know, and a few of us are getting on a bit, so we’ve been training and horse-riding and doing stunts and all that kind of thing, and then we start.”

From ContactMusic.com:

“We haven’t started filming, we got here mid-January and we were supposed to rehearse, doing lots of horse-riding and framing and stunts and all that, but then Peter got ill, he had a perforated ulcer, so filming was delayed for a few weeks. Filming starts in about three weeks and I start in a month, but it’s been great, so I’ve had lots of time off. A typical day will be little bit of training, doing a bit of that, trying to get strong, and then doing lots of stunt fights and movement, then going out and horse-riding. I mean, it’s basically playing is what we’re doing.”