Can you see why "The Lord of the Rings" remains as popular as ever decades after it was written?

Well, the genesis of it was really Tolkien's son being away in the army during the Second World War. It's essentially a story about a group of disparate characters that come together in order to fight against an overwhelming evil that threatens to destroy their world. It has a real resonance even today, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons why it's still so popular.

Were you a fan of the Tolkien books from your youth?

I think the final compilation came out when I was at university but I spurned it because of some sort of undergraduate idiocy on my part. I thought that nothing great could be contemporary. Getting into it after being cast as Gimli in the film I came to see what a huge and ambitious project it really is. Tolkien created an entire cosmology, countries with languages and completely different species. It is a huge achievement.

Do you think the film will live up to expectation?

I'm very confident that you have never seen a film like this before. When they opened the new "Star Wars" website before Christmas last year, it scored one million hits in the first 24 hours. When New Line opened the official "Lord of the Rings" website they recorded 1.7 million hits in the first 15 minutes. Recently I was told it's exceeded one billion hits. But most importantly, it's rare to find the excellence of a project, with such a huge potential audience, coming together to make something that's really wonderful.