Gollum in Lord of the Rings is Andy Serkis’ misunderstood triumph

The greatest technological advancement in the field screen acting has been motion capture. The Jazz Singer ushered in the era of synchronized sound in 1927, but it’s unclear where the field would be without the performance of Andy Serkis as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Follow-up The Return of the King. Jackson was not the first to use motion capture in a feature film, but he was the first to use it well, and Serkis’ work as Gollum is so persuasive that it would help birth a new kind of acting and filmmaking. Still, two decades in, it’s a bit difficult to describe, or understand, what it even means to talk about this new not-quite-live but not-quite-animated form of performance.

The Lord of the Rings’ 20th Anniversary is 2021. It’s hard to imagine the three-part story that would be enough. We’ll be going back to the movies every Wednesday for the rest of the year. This will allow us to examine how the films remain timeless as classics. This year is Polygon’s Year of the Ring.

Serkis tried first to explain what he did in making the documentary that was bundled with. Two Towers’ DVD release. Initially, all we see of Serkis in the documentary is a manic blur wrestling Elijah Wood’s Frodo and Sean Astin’s Sam. We spy on Jackson as he shoots Gollum’s entrance into the film. Gollum, who has been following Sam and Frodo for some time now is attacking Sam in an attempt to seize his precious and valuable ring. Wood and Astin pull Serkis around the stage and push him. He’s dressed in all white, complete with a hood. It looks almost like an angry larva or a Moon Knight discount.

“I’m playing the character of Gollum,” Serkis says in the doc. “Now, the character of Gollum does tend to belong to a lot of different departments, obviously, as a computer-generated character. But I guess what I’m doing is really providing the acting side of it, the emotional drive behind the character, the physicality, and I suppose, most importantly, the voice.”

Serkis only describes what all actors do on one level: they use their body and voices to convey the psychology and emotions of a character. Most actors can do these things all at once. Serkis would need to do all of those things separately, and he wouldn’t do them alone.

Image by New Line Cinema

Serkis, Jackson and Weta animators drew a sketch of the set while Serkis was there. Since motion-capture technology wasn’t yet in its infancy, there was little Serkis could do during principal photography. Two TowersIt would end up as the final product. In order to make Gollum, Serkis and the animators at Weta Digital broke down “the acting side of it” into its component parts, then stitched them back together like Frankenstein’s monster. Given the complex, fragmented nature of the construction, it is amazing that the final result is so convincing, so strongly felt, and so human.

Jackson shot every Gollum sequence two times: with Serkis as the actor and one without him. Later — many months later — Serkis recreated his blocking in a motion-capture studio. In a studio that was so clean that no crew member could bring water bottles in, Serkis donned a costume that allowed him to control a Gollum puppet and a special veil that showed how his movements would appear in the footage. He was surrounded by 25 cameras. To create an animated version of his performance and physical movements, Serkis then created them.

By today’s standards, the “puppet” was rudimentary. Far less of Gollum is an exact rendering of Serkis’ movements than most people today remember. As Bay Raitt, one of the 18 animators who created Gollum, explained to Animation World Network, “There is no facial motion-capture data, at all, on Gollum. The only motion-capture data is for his torso, legs and arms.”

The hands, feet, and, most importantly, facial expressions of Gollum were all animated later, using Serkis’ performance as reference footage. Gollum’s face is made up of 875 shapes that animators manipulated using 64 controls in order to create his many expressions. At times, the animators revised Serkis’ performance, altering the physicality or even the facial expressions, to better suit Jackson’s needs. Serkis additionally dropped by Weta’s offices to help the animators, modeling gestures or facial expressions they were struggling to realize.

Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

We’ve all seen these movies so many times over the last 20 years that it can be hard to really grasp the achievement of the end results. Motion capture was unsuccessful in the past. Sinbad: Beyond The Veil of Mists, performances so off-putting and soulless that one could not help but long for the heyday of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Gollum is the opposite — vividly alive, and essential to the success of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation. He is the story’s lone multidimensional character, and the battle for his soul, a soul that has long since been lost to the Ring of Power, buttresses the stakes of Frodo’s own struggle. We see, through looking at the pathetic, emaciated body of the former Smeagol, what could become of Frodo if he’s not careful.

Gollum is also a key component of Lord of the Rings’ action. Gandalf said it in the opening film. The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo’s choice to pity Smeagol and save his life “may rule the fate of man.” This, in turn, sets up Frodo’s declaration in Two Towers that “maybe he does deserve to die, but now that I see him, I do pity him.” Frodo and Sam’s journey to throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom is guided by Gollum, and it is Gollum who ultimately destroys the Ring and dies in the process. Frodo is able to survive his trip with the Ring thanks to the kindness he showed Gollum even though it nearly cost him his life.

This whole arc only works if the audience understands and sympathizes with multiple characters’ refusal to kill Gollum when they have the chance. Gollum can be untrustworthy and manipulative. George R.R. Martin novel, he’d have a life expectancy of a dependent clause. His survival in Lord of the Rings evokes the struggle of people to hold on to their best natures during the most difficult and urgent of times. This is a struggle that we faced when embarking on the War on Terror.

Serkis, along with the Weta Digital team made Gollum feel pathetic and stressed his split nature. While he appears grotesque and can move like a wild beast, his facial expressions seem very human. His adorable and repugnant nature is at the same time both hilarious and disgusting. He’s both conniving and childlike, a pining lover and a vicious killer, a victim of his own worst impulses. He often hunches in a full-body cringe, so disgusted with himself and afraid that he can barely look at who he’s talking to. Serkis’ voice work, particularly, is a marvel. Although his vocal choices are quite extreme for Gollum, he is able to find a wide range of sounds that are filled with microtonalities, grace notes, and a lot more. This is the film’s most complex and memorable performance, even though it was composed by 20 people.

Image by New Line Cinema

Serkis, when he was chosen to play Gollum in the film, was almost unknown to most people. He had been a journeyman stage actor in England, touring the country in productions of Brecht and playing a drag version of the Fool opposite Tom Wilkinson’s King Lear. He had only appeared in a few films, most notably Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy. He is well-respected for his vocal expression and stage training.

Because of the clarity and scale of his decisions, he is well-suited for animation’s expressive requirements in a way other actors might not. Robert Zemeckis’ 2004 film Polar ExpressA motion-captured Tom Hanks was featured in the film. This helped to popularize the notion of the uncanny Valley. Meanwhile, Serkis went on to become nearly synonymous with motion capture acting, taking roles as apes and bears and whatever a “Force-sensitive genetic strandcast humanoid male” is. One of his greatest performances came in Ninja Theory’s flop Odyssey to West: EnslavedThe first game in which characters can communicate using sophisticated and visible subtext. Serkis established The Imaginarium in 2011, a motion capture production company. Today, if you Google “Andy Serkis” and “motion capture,” one of the questions that comes up is about whether the actor invented the technology in the first place.

Motion capture evolved right alongside its greatest muse, becoming sophisticated enough that it is now often referred to as “performance capture.” By the time Serkis starred as Caesar in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes animators were able to capture facial expressions of actors, and the film pioneered a new system for on-set motion capture so actors didn’t have to fully re-create their performances in post. Serkis was able to view the movements of their monkey characters during filming with a new, real-time replay system. The performances — and the animation of them — grew so sophisticated that by 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, A.O. Scott of the New York Times declared Serkis’ Caesar “one of the marvels of modern screen acting.” Each of the three films in the series brought widespread speculation about whether Serkis would be nominated for an Oscar, and a wave of impassioned writing on why he should. The nominations never came.

New Line Cinema produced an Oscar campaign in support of Serkis’s character during Lord of the Rings before the advent of better immersive motion capture technology. The Academy declared that motion capture acting is eligible but no nominations were forthcoming. Parsing the authorship questions raised by performance capture proved too difficult, and Serkis’ somewhat self-interested attempts to clarify the matter only got him into trouble. In a 2014 interview with io9, referencing the various advances in animation technology since Lord of the Rings, Serkis said, “The way that Weta digital […]Their animators have been trained to respect the performance of the actors. […] that’s something that’s really changed. It’s a given that they absolutely copy [the performance] to the letter, to the point in effect what they are doing is painting digital makeup onto actors’ performances.”

The fury of the animators at being denied their contribution was understandable. Serkis’s genius is undisputed This article is available in EnglishAuthor of Gollum and Caesar as well as his motion capture roles such as Snoke, Monkey, Snoke and Monkey. As Randall William Cook, the animation supervisor for the Lord of the Rings films, put it to Cartoon Brew, “Gollum was a synthesis, a collaborative performance delivered by both Andy and a team of highly-skilled animation artists.” The staging, facial expressions, and interpretation of the role were often altered by animators in postproduction without Serkis’ involvement. Gollum’s most memorable scene — the one in which he debates with himself about betraying the hobbits at the end of Two Towers — was significantly altered by animators from Serkis’ original movements, according to Cook.

But screen acting is Always a synthesis of sorts, with many components of what we think of as cinematic acting lying beyond an individual actor’s control. Actors don’t choose which takes their directors use in a film, or what happens with those takes in the editing room. It is possible to cut and add dialogue after the fact. This can dramatically alter how an audience perceives a particular character. The pitch, timbre, and resonance of an actor’s voice can be altered with software. The musical score, the lighting, the other actors’ performances — the list of things outside an actor’s control that impact how we evaluate their work goes on and on. The motion capture does not make us wonder what acting on the screen means.

The art of filmmaking is collaborative. Every creative job has an impact on the other. The problem may be our need to claim authorship over what should be an collective accomplishment. Gollum was both a great character on screen and an amazing technical accomplishment. If anything, Gollum is as fascinating, complex, and captivating as the entire film series. Even for scholars of acting, this should be sufficient.

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