Which actor portrayed Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films?

Andy Serkis portrayed Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. His performance combined voice acting, physical performance and motion-capture work that was transformed into the trilogy’s digital character.

Gollum appears only briefly in The Fellowship of the Ring, released in 2001, but becomes a major character in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Serkis also reprised the role in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, released in 2012.

The character was created through a mixture of motion-capture data, traditional key-frame animation and rotoscoping. Animators at Weta Digital used Serkis’s facial features, movements and acting choices to shape Gollum’s final CGI appearance.

Serkis also supplied Gollum’s distinctive voice. He has said the famous throat sound was inspired by his cat coughing up hairballs. A common mix-up is calling Gollum simply a voice role: in Jackson’s films, Serkis’s physical performance was central to how the character moved and expressed emotion.