If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been much movement on The Hobbit since the announcing of Guillermo del Toro as director, it’s because they still don’t have a script. Actually, right about now the LOTR team is probably holed up somewhere working on that very thing. So it’ll be awhile till they actually get down to locking up casting, but when they do, there’s a good chance that cast list will include a guy named Doug Jones.

Jones is sort of like Guillermo del Toro’s Andy Serkis. In Hellboy, he’s the man behind Abe Sapien’s mask and you’ve also seen him riding a Silver Surfboard in the second Fantastic Four. There’s plenty of places in a movie like The Hobbit for actors who know how to work under heavy prosthetics, and del Toro recently assured IESB that there will be a place for Jones somewhere in Middle Earth.

Where exactly the formerly fishy Abe Sapien will fit in is something we won’t find out until they finish the script. Del Toro jokingly promises that it’ll be something hard. Maybe that means he and Serkis can team up to wear matching motion-capture unitards. If a full body condom isn’t Doug’s thing, with that lanky frame and those crazy cheek bones, he’d also make a scary good elf.