WHEN actor Andy Serkis had to come up with a voice for Gollum – Frodo’s slithering sidekick in “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” he turned to his three cats for inspiration.
“You know when they get fur balls in the back of their throat and their whole throat constricts up and they -eeck, cccckkkk,” Serkis, 38, began convulsing in his chair during a recent publicity stop at the Regency Hotel.
“Their whole body convulses and they go acckcckckkkkk and they cough up this stuff.”
When the film opens tomorrow, Gollum will be the talk of many a moviegoer – not just for his screechy voice but for a performance so lifelike, you can scarcely believe he’s a computer-animated creature.
Gollum – who makes Jar Jar Binks from “Star Wars” look like a stick figure – is already the talk of Hollywood, since New Line has been touting the role for a supporting actor Oscar.
“It’s no different than, say, John Hurt in ‘The Elephant Man,’ ” says Serkis, a relatively unknown English character actor who has appeared on screen in “24 Hour Party People,” “Topsy-Turvy” and “Career Girls.”
“The only difference here is that instead of having makeup, going in at 5 in the morning, sticking eight hours worth of prosthetics all over your face and having it painted by an artist, they’re doing it with pixels.”
In the trilogy’s first picture, we got only a fleeting glimpse of Gollum, the one-time keeper of the powerful and evil ring that Hobbit Frodo is on a mission to return to its source and destroy.
Gollum has more screen time in “Two Towers.” He tails along with Frodo and sidekick Sam, and helps navigate their path to Mordor, but it’s never clear whether he’s a help or a hindrance.
One thing is clear: He sure misses that ring.
“We wanted to play him like an addict, like the ring was his fix, and the loss of it and the withdrawals from it depleted him physically,” explains Serkis, who drank a brew of lemon, honey and ginger (“Gollum juice”) to soothe his frayed vocal chords during filming.
Director Peter Jackson said he was determined to find “an actor to actually create the character.”
So what separates the gray-skinned Gollum from other digital types is that his nearly every move is based on Serkis’ flesh-and-blood performance.
During filming, each scene with Gollum was shot three or more times: once on-set with Serkis acting out the movements, once with him out of frame but voicing his part, and other times in a special-effects lab, wearing a motion-capture suit.
When animators finally placed Gollum into the film, he was either installed directly over Serkis’ movements or drawn from his performances in the lab.
“It’s excellent CGI [computer-generated imaging]. I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Jeffrey Wells, who pens the Hollywood Elsewhere column for moviepoopshoot.com.
But as for an Oscar nomination, he adds: “I don’t think so – I haven’t heard one person talk about a nomination except for people at New Line.”
Except for a rockabilly hairdo that’s more Elvis than elfish, Serkis actually looks a bit like Gollum in person, with his eyes spaced widely apart and a furtiveness about his small nose and mouth.
Serkis, who lives in London with his wife and two kids, cannot go out to a party without being begged to “Do Gollum! Do Gollum!”
Spookily, all three of Serkis’ felines, Albe, Diz and Jake, have died in the last few months. The curse of Gollum?
“Two of them had strokes and one of them lost a leg,” he trailed off. “I didn’t mean to go into such details about the cats.”