The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies' Benedict Cumberbatch Recorded His Necromancer Lines Backwards

The cast of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies was at Comic-Con International: San Diego this past weekend, where they appeared at the Warner Bros. Hall H panel and answered questions at a subsequent press conference.

Benedict Cumberbatch, the Sherlock star who voices the dragon Smaug and the mysterious and nefarious Necromancer, fielded a question about how much practice went into his voice work.

"Quite a bit of practice," Cumberbatch explained. "I had to do a lot of warming up because I was forcing the register down so much. I always had a lot of hot lemon honey gingers at the ready. When we began it with motion capture and the first sessions in post-production, I was just doing on its own without any modulation. It really took a lot out of it, and it just meant there was a shelf-life to it, a very short shelf-life. A lot of warming up, and a lot of warming down, and a bit of silent rest in-between."

He also revealed a little trick he used when doing the dialog for the Necromancer, to help in making him that much more unsettling: he said his lines backwards.

"It was horrible," Cumberbatch said. "It was really hard, but I wanted that sort of horrible, Satanic quality to him."

The rest of the panelists teased him for being an overachiever, with Cate Blanchett calling him a "showoff."

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies opens in theaters December 17.