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Review Of ' The Lord Of The Rings '

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The incredible complexity of Gollum is evident to anyone who watches the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Although he is a CGI character, he offers great emotional depth. There is never any doubt that he is just as real and important as the movies’ non CGI characters. Clearly, animators painstakingly created Gollum to achieve this realism; however, what audiences are less aware of, myself included, is the extremes that Andy Serkis, the actor behind Gollum, went to in order to create him. Now, Serkis is well known as an actor who can achieve incredible physical transformations. Roles including Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, King Kong in King Kong, and the ape Caesar in the Planet of the Apes movies have made Serkis a household …show more content…

They look up on-screen and see me in those roles” (cite NPR) To achieve his masterful physical transformation into Gollum, Serkis started with the character’s voice. Serkis states that he wanted “to find the construction in [Gollum’s] throat, the source of his pain” (cite Guardian). He viewed Gollum’s voice as intrinsically linked to his physicality, with Gollum’s body being controlled by the ring and then his voice and the gollum sounds he makes being an involuntary manifestation. Accidently, Serkis used his own pet cat to create Gollum’s distinctive voice. He noticed how when his cat threw up a furball, it was “like the whole body writhes from the tip of the neck to the tip of the tail and convulses. And you see this ripple goes down its spine” (cite NPR). Although Serkis started with Gollum’s voice, the character’s voice and his physicality were always linked. This technique is reminiscent with our own experiments with animal masks in class. While working on our character pieces, we picked an animal that matched that character and then experienced the character as that animal. This method proves to be incredibly helpful because it allows the actor to uncover a hidden side of the character--that animal nature we all have but suppress as civilized members of society. Watching Serkis’ performance

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