So I found myself in New Zealand, six and a half thousand feet up a mountain
in a lycra suit with the crew not knowing why the hell I was there and Peter Jackson laughing at me.
They came around to my house
like a couple of hobbits actually. But I'm not sure that Peter Jackson was even wearing
shoes, he never does in New Zealand. And they sat on my sofa and they showed me
some designs, they talked about the story and I rather grandly said, well let me read the script.
Oh dear.
I wasn't mad keen. It was a year living in New Zealand, a place I'd always wanted to visit.
I'd heard how beautiful it was. A year away from home on a script that wasn't quite complete based on
books that I didn't know about. It wasn't the huge big chance of a lifetime that it turned out to be.
Did you always have the faith that it was going to be quite as impactful as it became?
I didn't really care to be honest. I just wanted to work with Peter Jackson.
You know, Braindead and I mean all the zombie stuff that he and Fran had done. I love zombies.
So that really interested me and he's got this intense sense of the ugly which I thought would
be really interesting to bring out in Tolkien's work. So it was the endeavor that interested me.
I had no idea that it was going to be what it was. I guess somebody did, Peter and Fran did.
I very nearly couldn't do it because
initially I was asked by Tom Cruise to be in Mission Impossible 2
and they would only show me a part of one scene.
I couldn't read the whole script in case I told people.
So I said I'm sorry I can't be in your film because I don't know what it is.
And my agent said, you're turning down the chance to work with Tom Cruise? I said, well I
don't know if it is a chance. Well I did. That movie delayed and delayed and delayed,
Tony Hopkins played my part and if I'd contracted myself to do that I wouldn't have been able to do
X-Men and I wouldn't have been able to do Lord Of The Rings.
I got a call from my then agent saying look they're making this film of Lord Of The Rings
down in New Zealand and they want someone to do the voice for a digital character in Lord Of The Rings.
And I said, well look Lord Of The Rings has got a dozen really good parts in it,
can you not get me up for something decent? I don't really... I'm not a voice actor and I
don't really want to do a voice for a digital character. So can you just see...
- How about a dwarf or something perhaps. - And so then they said, well we're not
quite sure what it is exactly but it's Gollum and I was going all right well I remember
Gollum from The Hobbit. I read The Hobbit, I hadn't read Lord Of The Rings at the time.
And they said well that we're not quite sure how it works but you you've got to audition for it.
So I thought well how am I going to audition for this? I'm not a voice actor, I really am not. I'm
not one of those actors who's like a mimic or can go in and do voices or impressions or you know
that's not me. I have to go into the character to find a voice as part of building a character.
My son knew the story, the long and complicated story and I just thought it was crazy on their
part when they were already underway shooting to try to have someone play the part who had no idea
what it was about. Even if I hadn't recognized many of the themes and that essentially the foundation
of Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings is you know Nordic literature and mythology and Celtic as well, but
it's something that I was very familiar with. On the airplane I was grasping anything, anything I
could and when I realized, oh this reminds me of that saga and this reminds me of that then I went,
one of the first things I did in between the crash course I had with
sword play training with Bob Anderson and the dialect coach and the costume fittings and
everything else and I found as many copies of say the Volsunga Saga and other sagas to reread them.
So I started to think about how I could approach this and I was at home and reading. I started
reading Lord Of The Rings and I knew I was going to be auditioning and thinking how am
I going to do this? So anyway I started reading and you know Gollum is you know
obviously the power of the ring engulfs this being and twists and contorts him and he's
called Gollum because of the way he sounds and he says Gollum Gollum you know. And I'm thinking
how am I going to approach this? Where does this character carry his guilt and pain? And
it was his throat. Oh so okay well let's think, so maybe his throat's really constricted. Okay
well maybe, what is the ring? Well the ring's a bit like an obsession, maybe it's like an
addiction and he's maybe like an addict you know. So I started to think along the terms of him being
like a heroine addict or cocaine, someone who is obsessed by something and unless they get
it they're going to go crazy. And then I was thinking physically how am I going to find this
and I wanted to find something that the effect of the ring had an involuntary action,
made him spasm in some way and then this is gospel truth, my cat came into the room,
Diz his name was Diz, no longer with us, and came in and started coughing up furballs
and as he was coughing up furballs the whole of his head through to the tip of his tail was
doing this kind of this kind of weird action and he started going [retching sound] like that. So that then became
[transition from retching to saying Gollum] sort of the genesis of that voice.
So I went in for the audition and I jumped up on the
- With the furball
Yeah thinking of furball. And jumped up on the chair and sort of started
doing a version which wasn't the actual,
it was a sort of a version of that for the casting director John Hubbard who sat there and he was
reading off lines and he just went [silent with mouth open] like that
And so I thought, oh no he thinks this is terrible, I think this is a complete disaster, I've really screwed this one up.
Another thing I thought of, I don't know, is that, I was listening to what I was speaking there
and I remember having this idea because the character over three movies you know should gradually reveal
himself for who he really is. It wasn't just the way he, what he called himself and how he dressed,
his behavior but it was also the fact that he was a ranger and he was around certain people
from a certain part of Middle Earth. To me that's why he would speak that way. That was part of his
disguise and had been for quite some time and I wanted to make a gradual transition so that by
the end by the coronation scene that his accent would gradually change and become more refined
and he would let all of those masks fall away so to speak so it partially worked but um...
The internet had just been invented.
You could send emails to people, you could access people's websites, you could
begin to communicate with people who you would never meet,
like-minded people. And I used to send a regular diary from the set as did Peter and together we
invented blogging. - Congratulations
- It had not been done before. I called it e-posts, didn't catch on. Blogging.
And we got messages back saying that there were
many many people who were very very keen on the idea of this film as long as it was the
film that they wanted to be made that it was going to be their Middle Earth.
How do you avoid the factor of intimidation, expectation
and pressure of that kind of situation? I think because the challenge was so big and I knew
I could but disappoint legions of of hepburn fans. Then you just have to throw caution
to the wind really and know that you're going to screw up.
There was some disapproval to me playing Gandalf because I was a gay man. Oh pathetic. I mean
Gandalf isn't interested in sex, he's 7000 years old. He's got over sex long ago.
We got the sense that there was an eager eager audience and much to the disapproval of the of the
PR people of the studio, under the radar as it were, Peter and I were contacting these people
and keeping them sweet. By the time the first film came out and we went back to New Zealand to do
pickups on the second and then third films we knew there were millions of people who couldn't wait
for the films that were yet to come and it's a very very unusual situation to be in to be making
a film that you know is going to make an awful lot of money because the audience will definitely turn
up to see it. So it was it was all charming and to be placed at the center of all that which I was
was a strange strange feeling. I still haven't quite got over it. I don't feel I
can take any credit for the success of those films. I did my part.
As soon as I laid eyes on Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh I sort of fell in love with them,
literally fell in love with them when I first met them. And he said, now look we are,
we don't... he explained the process, he said I want an actor to play Gollum but we can't finally
manifest him on screen with an actor because you could never cast someone who's three and a half
foot tall and that wiry and skinny and emaciated and twisted and with a slightly larger head.
We would never find an actor to do that. So we're going to animate him finally or
he'll be manifested using CG finally but we want an actor to play him because
we don't want the actors playing Sam and Frodo to have to imagine
what's going on inside this guy's head by looking at a tennis ball on a stick, because at that time
that's how visual effects were created. And so I said, well look I'd love the idea of
this challenge. And he said, yeah we're toying with this idea of using this technology which
has come out of the medical industry called motion capture. It went from sort of thinking I was just
going to be doing this voice to actually being down in New Zealand for a year and a half on set.
As much as certainly after the first movie he became more and more
interested in pursuing something that he's very good at which is
special effects and sort of more fantastical visual aspects of the storytelling,
he did maintain an interest in the emotional through lines of the characters, their worries,
their fears. And you know here again on the page you could easily have played that part
with a certain stoicism that would have been devoid of any real serious doubt.
My first shot in Lord Of The Rings was, you know obviously it was three films but they were shot
concurrently and my first shot was scene 729 which was halfway up Mount Doom, trying to stop Frodo
and Sam getting to the top. And so I found myself in New Zealand, six and a half thousand feet
up a mountain in a lycra suit with the crew not knowing why the hell I was there and Peter Jackson
laughing at me. So we did this scene and then when he saw what I was doing he said, okay okay
we're gonna sort of reconfigure this. We're not gonna just animate the character, we're going
to literally copy every single movement that Andy does and we're going to copy every single
facial expression that he's doing and he's going to become the template for this digital character.