'Cyber-actor' behind Gollum steals the show in 'Lord of the Rings'

He walks, he talks, he rolls on his belly like a snake.

By gosh, it's Gollum, the Hobbit-like creature Smeagol whose body has been deformed and whose mind has been warped by desire for his "precious."

"The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," the second in director Peter Jackson's film trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy saga, has epic scope and action to spare. But it could be argued that the piteous monstrosity Gollum, with his monkeylike physicality and catlike yowling, steals the show.

Not only is Gollum a compelling addition to the quest by the Hobbit Frodo and his faithful sidekick, Sam, to destroy a powerful ring — Gollum's "precious," which is coveted by the forces of evil. But the character itself is something to behold as well.

Gollum is a "performance-based digital creation," according to the film's promotional materials. Which means it was created in the computer using actor Andy Serkis as model.

Serkis appeared in scenes with Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, who play Frodo and Sam, "wearing a skintight leotard (and) acting like Gollum," Jackson said in a recent interview. "Then the animation department would animate Gollum over Andy.

"So we have a version of all those scenes where you can see the computer-generated Gollum and, because he's skinny, behind him you can see Andy in the leotard doing all the same movements. And then we painted Andy out."

For other scenes, Serkis spent months in the "motion capture" studio by himself, wearing a suit with "dots all over it, and those dots refer to joints in my body," Serkis said.

"Those dots were picked up by cameras and fed into computers," he said. Close-ups of Serkis' face were used to create Gollum's various expressions.

Serkis, a slight British actor with a wispy goatee, appeared in "24 Hour Party People" and "Topsy-Turvy." He said he modeled the character's choked voice on the way his cat sounds "when it gets fur trapped in the back of its throat and its whole body convulses."

Serkis said Gollum's voice "was born out of a desire to find out where his pain is trapped."

"Gollum is called Gollum because of the sound he makes," Serkis added. "It's a constriction in his throat. I wanted that constriction to be like a tightening, a tourniquet gripping his throat."

It was like "a sense memory of a traumatic incident" that scarred him, Serkis said.

Gollum isn't the first digitally created character to play a prominent role in a film.

First, there was Jar Jar Binks, in "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace." More recently, there was Dobby the house elf in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and Yoda's famed fight scene in "Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones."

"No offense to those characters," said Philippa Boyens, a co-writer of the screenplay for "The Two Towers," "but Gollum is far more complex. ... I'm not just talking about the physically brilliant execution. I'm talking about the depth. There's no comparison between Gollum and (anything else) in literature, much less film."

Jackson feels strongly that even though Gollum is a partly synthetic character, Serkis' contribution was considerable enough to merit an Oscar nomination.

"I do feel Andy's contribution and involvement in the performance of Gollum is as relevant as 'The Elephant Man' performance that John Hurt gave," Jackson said. "John Hurt was beneath rubber that didn't look like him and had to manipulate that rubber to give a performance."

Serkis, Jackson said, wears "a pixilated prosthetic," and "there's no difference between that and what an actor under (rubber) prosthetics" does.

Serkis calls "rubbish" the idea, as proposed in the recent film "Simone," that synthetic or virtual actors created in the computer could be used to replace human actors.

"You just wouldn't bother going to all that expense" and time spent to create a character that a real actor can play more cheaply and easily, he said.

"But it is interesting," Serkis said. "I wouldn't say to actors, 'Don't do it,' because cyber-acting is acting, too."