Smeagle - Adaptations - Film and Stage

Film and Stage

In the Rankin/Bass adaptations of The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980), Gollum appears as a frog-like creature with large, lamp-like eyes. His voice is provided by Brother Theodore. Despite Tolkien's description, Gollum is portrayed as almost naked, save for a loin-cloth.

In Ralph Bakshi's animated film of The Lord of the Rings (1978), the voice of Gollum was supplied by Peter Woodthorpe, who also reprised the role in the BBC's 1981 radio serial.

In the Soviet-era television film Сказочное путешествие мистера Бильбо Бэггинса, Хоббита (The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit), Gollum is portrayed by Igor Dmitriev.

Kari Väänänen portrayed Gollum (Finnish: Klonkku) in the 1993 live-action television miniseries Hobitit that was produced and broadcast by the Finnish network Yle.

In Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Gollum is a CGI character voiced and performed by actor Andy Serkis. He is smaller than both Frodo and Sam. Barely glimpsed in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), he becomes a central character in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and a main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). The CGI character was built around Serkis' facial features, voice and acting choices. Andy Serkis based his voice on sounds made by his cat. 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 the traditional animation process of Key frame, along with the laborious process of digitally rotoscoping Serkis' image and replacing it with the digital Gollum's in a technique coined rotoanimation. This work required a large number of digital artists. As in the animated depictions of the character, Gollum is shown as virtually naked save for a loincloth in the trilogy.

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 the screenwriters felt 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.

Gollum's split personality is emphasized in Jackson's films; screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens included scenes in The Two Towers, The Return of the King and An Unexpected Journey in which "Gollum" and "Sméagol" argue, with Serkis slightly altering his voice and body language to play the two as separate entities. His dual personality was also emphasized by different pupil dilation — with "Gollum" having small, piercing pupils and "Sméagol" larger "doe-like" pupils — and position on different sides of the screen.

Serkis and Gollum appeared on the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, when Gollum won "Best Virtual Performance" and went on to deliver an obscenity-laden acceptance speech in character. This clip can be found as an easter egg in The Two Towers DVD. Wizard Magazine rated Jackson's Gollum as the 62nd greatest villain of all time, from among 100 villains from film, television, comics and video games. In addition, Serkis as Gollum was placed thirteenth on Empire's "100 Greatest Movie Characters of all Time".

Serkis once again played Gollum in the prequel film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, released in 2012.

Gollum also appears in the independently-produced 2009 prequel to the Jackson film The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Chris Bouchard. Bouchard's CGI Gollum is directly inspired by Gollum in the Jackson films.

These film adaptations have varied in how they depicted Gollum visually. In Bakshi's film, Gollum is dark, bald and gangly. The Jackson films depicted Gollum similarly, though pale. In contrast, in the Rankin/Bass adaptations, he is a pale green, frog-like creature with huge, pupil-less eyes.

In Canada, Gollum was portrayed by Michael Therriault in the three-hour stage production of The Lord of the Rings, which opened in 2006 in Toronto.

Gollum also appears in a three-part comic book adaptation of The Hobbit, scripted by Chuck Dixon and Sean Deming and illustrated by David Wenzel. It was first published by Eclipse Comics in 1989. A reprint collected in one volume was released by Unwin Paperbacks in 1990 and by Del Rey Books in 2001.