Gollum

As portrayed by Andy Serkis in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings."

Gollum was barely glimpsed in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), but he becomes a central character in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). The CGI character was built around Serkis' facial features, voice and acting choices. Using a digital puppet created by Jason Schleifer and Bay Raitt at Weta Digital, animators created Gollum's performance using a mixture of motion capture data recorded from Serkis and a process called keyframing. The laborious process of digitally "painting out" Serkis' image and replacing it with the digital Gollum's required large numbers of digital artists. Including all the lighting, composition and rendering, each frame of Gollum's performance took four hours to compute.

A minor controversy arose when Serkis was judged ineligible to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Serkis' supporters claimed that since he performed both the voice and the presence of the character through motion capture, he should be eligible of a nomination.

In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Serkis himself appears in a flashback scene as Sméagol before his degeneration into Gollum. This scene was originally earmarked for The Two Towers, but was held back because it was felt that audiences would relate better to the original Sméagol once they were more familiar with who he became. The decision to include this scene meant that Raitt and Jamie Beswarick had to redesign Gollum's face for the second and third movies so that it would more closely resemble Serkis'. (The brief glimpses in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring are of an earlier model of Gollum.)

While Gollum's split personality was strongly implied in the original novels, it was made explicit in Jackson's films; screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens included scenes in the Two Towers and Return of the King in which "Gollum" and "Sméagol" argue, with Serkis clearly altering his voice and body language to play the two as separate entities.
These adaptations have varied in how they depicted Gollum visually. In Bakshi's film, Gollum is dark, bald and gangly. The Jackson films depicted Gollum quite similarly, though pale. In contrast, in the Rankin/Bass adaptations, he is a pale green, frog-like creature with huge, pupil-less eyes.

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