Santiago SeguraMauro writes: I was listening to a Basta de Todo interview with the great Spanish actor/comedian/writer Santiago Segura, who performed in many movies and is a personal friend of both Guillermo del Toro and Alex de la Iglesia, featured in a lot of movies of both filmmakers. He performed starring roles in Spanish released titles of both of them and he did several cameo roles on the Hollywood movies of Alex and Guillermo (Hellboy, Perdita Durango, Blade II, etc). He’s sort of a fetish actor for both, he mentioned he’s traveling next week to New Zealand to “visit” his friend Guillermo, (he jokingly said “I’m going down there to beg him for a role on The Hobbit”). The interviewers and Santiago even hinted that the chance of a role is pretty much secure. Santiago Segura imdb

Christopher Leestormcrow20 writes: Sir Christopher Lee is once again collaborating with Tim Burton in the director’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”. Mr. Lee will be portraying the Jabberwock. Check out the link for more casting information, as well as a small assortment of photos of the main players. More..

mignola_lgMessage board members Earl and Theodred alerted us to a recent video interview with Mike Mignola at collider.com. In addition to saying how much he’s looking forward to Comic-Con, Mike made some brief, but very interesting comments about the week and a half he recently spent in New Zeeland working on The Hobbit, and what we can expect:

“It’s hard to say at this point, because so much work had been done before I even got there that I looked at it and I said wow, it looks like a 16 hour, insane movie, there’s so much in it. It’s too early for me to tell how much stuff is going to get pared down. I don’t really feel comfortable saying too much, except that it looks amazing. And it’s very much a del Toro stamp on that world.”

Check out the complete interview here.

DragonCon 2008The 2009 DragonCon schedule promises to be interesting and fun and features John Noble, a list of speakers and even TheOneRing.net. The event takes place annually, this year September 4-7, in a series of hotels in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. You can read details about the convention here and all the details of the Tolkien programming right here. TORn is scheduled to present an unauthorized look at everything we know so far about the production of ‘The Hobbit’ films and then present for discussion many of the things still open for speculation just as official pre-production begins.

Andrea and Robert from www.badtaste.it send this in: Hi, just wanted to tell you we met Howard Shore during a public speech yesterday in Rome, before a Lord of the Rings Symphony performance at Auditorium Parco della Musica.

He answered a few questions about The Hobbit: he’s composing music for the movies, and he said that as we all know, there’s a new director, but Guillermo Del Toro wants people feel these movies are part of the trilogy. So, especially when you’ll see the second Hobbit movie, you are going to feel a strong continuity with the Fellowship of the Ring – even musically. Obviously, there will be new compositions and a lot of different things, but they are going to establish a strong connection between the movies, thanks to characters like Bilbo and the Dwarves.