Bilbo Baggins, by Way of the Meerkat The "Les Miz" folks were preoccupied with the teeth of their singing cast, but on the New Zealand set of "The Hobbit," it was feet that got the actors in character. Martin Freeman, who plays the diminutive Bilbo Baggins, wore prosthetic Hobbit feet as he moved around the Shire, which entirely changed his gait. "They were quite heavy," he said, at the afterparty for the movie's premiere on Thursday. And they were six inches longer than your real feet. So it immediately changes the way you move. Mr. Freeman, a self-effacing British actor best known to American audiences as Tim in the original version of "The Office" (John Krasinski plays it as Jim in the American show) and as Watson in the series "Sherlock," had a fair amount of fanboys in the crowd at the afterparty. "You must be relieved," one said, approaching. The film took years to make. "I'm very relieved, thank you," Mr. Freeman replied. "You've really pulled it off!" another said. Mr. Freeman turned back to us and admitted that he rather liked literally stepping into Bilbo's paws. "It's quite nice, actually, when you make decisions as a character that you don't have to manufacture, they're just of necessity," he said. He always has a nervous energy in his hands and he's always twitching something, and the feet kind of helped with that. They "played into the way I felt about Bilbo," he continued. At the beginning anyway, he had a slightly awkward feeling about him. This being a Peter Jackson 3D fantasy, Mr. Freeman could have conceived of his character as any number of fanciful creatures - some amalgam of shy elf or uncomfortable dwarf. "I kind of saw him as a meerkat," he said. "Like" - and here, leaning against a light pole at the glitzy affair, he assumed a paws-up, curious meerkat pose - "he's down there, he's waaay down. Or then, he's up! Mr. Freeman gamely imitated a meerkat suddenly popping up. Somehow no fanboys were around to witness this. Of course, by the time shooting was over, Bilbo has grown and developed, as had Mr. Freeman's understanding of him. At the end of the first installment, he said, he's "a meerlion. A meertiger!