For reference, this is what that character wound up looking like in the finished film:
New Line CinemaLike a "faces of meth" Panthro.
So, rather than del Toro's trademark visceral style of bone-gore monsters, we were given the most antiseptic version of a cartoon fantasy creature that somehow looked worse than any single orc in the original Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
Del Toro set the bar as high as he possibly could for Smaug, the villainous dragon that was originally the climax of The Hobbit until the movie inexplicably decided to make it about a dwarf war. He declared that Smaug would be the first character they'd start designing and the last one to be approved. Del Toro reasoned that the dragon's design should reflect its ability to speak -- its mouth should be able to make the sounds that human mouths do. That style of dramatically outside-the-box thinking resulted in a weirdly awesome beast that was truly unlike any dragon that had ever appeared in a movie before:
New Line CinemaBut somehow still looking kind of like Benedict Cumberbatch.
Again, compare del Toro's design to what wound up in the finished film -- in this case, a very traditional dragon improbably speaking with the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch, complete with weirdly incongruous lip movements that del Toro decided would be the make-or-break line for audience believability:
New Line Cinema"His mouth is all wrong! No one is going to believe that dragon can talk!" -Guillermo del Toro
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