Gollum Role 'Preciousssss' to Actor Serkis

Andy Serkis is a mass of athletic energy and gangly limbs, barely contained in a conference-room chair.

He squirms sideways, leans back, hunches forward. A leg sticks out to the side as if he's forgotten he owns it.

It's easy to imagine Serkis as Gollum, the tortured, emaciated creature from "The Lord of the Rings" movies: It seems he'd be more comfortable perched on a rock or leaping off of one, arms flying, to land on something else.

Playing Gollum, a partly computer-generated creature, was such a novel experience that Serkis wrote a book about it. He was in Seattle on Thursday to promote "The Lord of the Rings: Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic."

The book tour, which started in New York and ends next week in Japan, takes him away from his wife and two children, 31/2-year-old Sonny and 51/2-year-old Ruby.

Serkis is a healthy, cheerful guy with a head of wildly curly dark hair. Gollum, on the other hand, is a sullen, emaciated creature with sallow skin and just a few straight, scraggly strands of hair.

Serkis seems full of jumpy energy; Gollum slithered. Serkis talks a million miles a minute; Gollum whispered, whined and wheedled.

But ask Serkis the right question, and his voice suddenly drops.

"My preciousssss," he hisses.

Gollum was computer-generated because no human could climb headfirst down cliffs and perform other maneuvers described by author J.R.R. Tolkien in his "Lord of the Rings" books.

But Serkis was the basis for Gollum. He acted every scene with the actors in the movies and provided Gollum's voice. The computer- generated character was painted onto the film over Serkis' image.

That wasn't director Peter Jackson's original intention. Serkis, a British actor who had been in "Topsy-Turvy" and other movies, originally was hired just to record Gollum's voice.

He prepared for his audition by reading "The Lord of the Rings" and thinking about the things that tortured Gollum: He'd murdered his cousin; he'd been cast out by his family and his people; he loved and hated the ring that made him reject a normal life; he'd been living alone, underground, for centuries.

"He's such an extreme character in the books that my goal was to bring him more humanity," Serkis said.

Tolkien described Gollum as having a gurgling sound in his throat.

"Well, why?" Serkis said he asked himself. "I decided he carries his pain in his throat."

In the books, Gollum makes a noise in his throat that Tolkien described as "gollum, gollum," and which gave the character his name. Serkis wasn't sure how to make the sound until one of his cats, Diz, came into the room and coughed up a hairball.

Serkis filmed an audition for the voice role. Director Peter Jackson was captivated by his performance.

Serkis got the role - and more. Eventually, Jackson decided to base the entire character on Serkis' facial expressions and body movements.

"We wanted to re-create what is compelling about a human performance," Jackson wrote in an essay in Serkis' book. "If you look at close-ups of actors, it is all down to very subtle facial movements and their eyes. ... The emotion that they're playing basically comes from their soul, and computers don't have souls."

Serkis spent four and a half years in New Zealand filming the "Rings" movies - longer than most of the other actors in the three films. For much of his work he wore a spandex body suit, or a blue suit equipped with sensors that helped animators chart Gollum's movements.

Many fans were angered that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled him ineligible for an Oscar in 2003, saying that academy members didn't understand Serkis' role in creating Gollum. Serkis was asked to address members of the Screen Actors Guild who were concerned that someday computer-generated characters might replace actors.

He said he wrote the "Gollum" book to explain the experience of playing Gollum. Now, though, the question he gets asked most often is, "Will you do the voice?"

He generally accepts. He can't count how many radio-station promotions he's recorded. And he played Gollum on "The Simpsons." And of course, he's recorded answering-machine messages for friends.

"Too many to count," he said, rolling his eyes.

The Lord of the Rings:

Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic

By Andy Serkis

Houghton Mifflin Co., $9.95