An Oscar for Gollum

You may have heard rumblings recently about an Oscar of some sort being awarded to the actor that played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. You may have thought that it was ridiculous since the character is complete digitized; nothing of the actor himself remains. However, The Next Reel − December 18, 2002 on Green Cine has a very good (and long) article about the filming.

The last page, Gollum, contains a lengthy explanation of how this character was brought to the screen and was so life-like. The actor, Andy Serkis…

“was in the shots with Frodo and Sam; we filmed him. And he’d be doing Gollum, down on all fours, he’d be reacting, saying his lines, working out the timings with them. Everything would be natural, would feel like he wasn’t a special effect because, of course, he wasn’t at that point. It was Andy Serkis in a leotard, playing out the drama of the scenes.”

The reason they think he should get an Oscar is because every natural action you see Gollum performing comes from Andy. The animations were laid right on top of the actor and the actor himself was simply edited out. “If Andy decided to suddenly pull his hand back because he was frightened, then Gollum’s hand would go back.” His motions were also captured with a “motion capture suit”, so even other movements added in later were mapped from his physical frame.

“Also, with the close-ups, we modeled Gollum’s face to look like Andy because we wanted every expression that Andy pulled as an actor doing the performance reflected in a computer Gollum that would actually look like Andy.”

So, in fact, the actor was extremely involved in the final product. It’s just that he’s been replaced by a stylized digital image; it’s more a form of digital make-up than anything else and all credit for believability and for the incredible performance goes to him.