Andy Serkis has opened up about how he was approached to play Gollum in Lord of the Rings and on the little misunderstanding that followed.
Although he has a few notable open-face roles (in The Prestige or more recently The Batman et Andor), the bulk of Andy Serkis' career has been in motion captureof which he became the most experienced actor, and therefore the most emblematic. His CV speaks for itself: Star Wars (Snoke), Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (Baloo), Planet of the Apes (César), The Adventures of Tintin (Capitaine Haddock), King Kong (Kong), and of course Lord of the Rings in which he plays the pitiful Gollum.
Beyond the place that Gollum (re)took in the collective imagination and popular culture, this experience marked a major turning point in the career of the Briton, who had not then toured extensively and even less in productions of this scale. The creation of the Hobbit corrupted by the Ring was also another testing ground for the beginnings of motion capture After The Phantom Menace in 1999 and before the crucial advances of Robert Zemeckis in this area.
Because if today the vision of actors in combination with sensors on the face is no longer incongruous, precisely thanks to Lords of the Rings and others Avatarit was not obvious at the end of the 90s when Peter Jackson's teams awkwardly approached Serkis. Hence the slight misunderstanding that followed.
Tell him yes, Andy
During a Fan Expo San Francisco panel led by ScreenRantAndy Serkis returned to how he was approached to the role, for which he only thought he would do traditional voice dubbing :
“When I was first approached for the role, it was my agent who explained everything to me when I first spoke to them on the phone. They told me they were making a little film in New Zealand called Lord of the Rings and they wanted me to do the voice of a digital character. I said to myself: ” What ? There must be a dozen good roles in this movie, can't you hire me for something decent? » And they said, “Well, it’s Gollum.” And I said, “That’s a decent role.” Yes, yes, okay, I’m listening.”
But basically, I was only told about the voice. Then when I met Peter Jackson and auditioned, he explained to me that they were going to try this new technology called motion capture and that he wanted an actor on set to play with the others. It's true that until then, many CGI characters were represented by a tennis ball on a stick, and the actors had to pretend to interact with it. […]«
He obviously didn't stop there:
« Motion capture aside, I approached it like any other role, looking at psychology and physics, then voice. For me, none of this was dissociable. I can't just find a voice, it doesn't work that way for me as an actor.
So I started thinking about Gollum's guilt after killing his cousin, how that guilt was internalized, and decided it was stuck in his throat. This sort of involuntary action helped advance Gollum's sound. »
Its precious
And because the best results can be the fruit of the most curious, not to say ridiculous, ideas, Serkis took advantage of the panel to remind us that the characteristic guttural sound of his Gollum was actually inspired by his cat:
“It's the truth and many of you may already know, while I was working on the voice my cat Diz came into the shot and started coughing up a hairball. I saw his spine jerk as he tried to get [la boule de poils]and that's exactly where Gollum's voice came from. »
However, despite Andy Serkis' performance, the Academy Awards denied him a nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category due to the fact that his character is entirely digital. A decision which also applied to his Caesar in the last trilogy Planet of the Apes.
If he should not take up the role of Knull, the creator of the symbiotes discovered in Venom 3Andy Serkis will take over the one who made him known in The Hunt for Gollumwhich he will direct himself after having been second unit director on the trilogy of Hobbit. This new film will adapt a note from JRR Tolkien's novel which explains that Gandalf and Aragorn pursued Gollum for almost eight years, traveling through all regions of Middle-earth to Mordor where Gollum was eventually captured by Sauron.
Obviously, as the project is still at an embryonic stage of development, no release date has been communicated.
