And the Oscar for best actor in the role of a tree goes to…

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This article was published 13/12/2002 (8427 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK CITY — “What career arc is this?” rumbles John Rhys-Davies.

With a booming baritone forged in English Shakespearean theatre, Rhys-Davies is referring to his decision to make what will likely be the biggest movies of his career as the dwarf warrior Gimli in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

One problem: Rhys-Davies is layered under enough makeup to keep him virtually disguised.

“Just goes to show: No matter how smart an actor thinks he is, they’re all dumb,” he says. “Thirty years of trying to be recognized and I end up in full prosthetics in three major movies and I end up playing a tree!”

The latter reference is to Treebeard, a pivotal character who helps turn the tide for the hobbit heroes of the second Lord of the Rings installment The Two Towers. Treebeard is, well, a tree.

“Isn’t it sad?” he jokes. “Rhys-Davies’s entire career can be described as chewing the scenery, has finally become the scenery.”

The fact that Treebeard was going to require a voice was apparently an afterthought to director Peter Jackson, who simply approached Rhys-Davies on the set and asked: “Do you want to be the voice of Treebeard, as well?”

“And I said yes,” Rhys-Davies says. “And you know, I lost more sleep over trying to do Treebeard than I ever did over Gimli.

“Gimli is just wonderful. You read the book and if you’re a character actor, you know how to find the character,” he says. “It’s a combination of the way he puts the weight on the ground, what he looks like, how he moves, how to get the prosthetic working.

“Treebeard, on the other hand you can’t play Treebeard the way he’s written. Because he’s the oldest creature on the Earth, but he’s also very slow. It’s ‘Umm, let me think hmmm hmmm.’ The film’s dead! Dead!

“So you have to find a way of representing that age and that difficulty of accessing such remote information in the distant past,” he says.

After some tortured contemplation (“A tree doesn’t have lungs so it would be presumably possible to speak the words on the inhale rather than just the exhale,” he decided at one point), Rhys-Davies simply decided to simplify the voice to something old and venerable.

The easy way out was not an option for London-based actor Andy Serkis, who may very well end up nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for his work as Gollum, a hobbit transformed into a reptilian creature by his possession of the Ring.

Jackson determined that he was going to create the most lifelike CGI character in the film medium to date, and he employed Serkis to give Gollum his extra dimension of realism.

Clad in a leotard, Serkis performed the role of Gollum on camera, mostly opposite hobbits Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin). And then he performed it again, duplicating Gollum’s movements for motion capture technology in studio.

The image on screen may be digital, but the performance is Serkis’s, Jackson affirms.

“I really don’t think that how Andy has driven the collection of pixels that make up Gollum’s skin is any different from an actor with actual prosthetics on,” Jackson says. “Is what John Hurt did under The Elephant Man makeup really any different to what Andy’s doing? It’s like pixillated prosthetics, sort of allowing an actor’s performance to ride through the trickery.”

Serkis agrees. It must have been a performance. He has the aches and pains to prove it.

“I can’t deny it was physically very demanding having to do every scene twice,” he says, adding that the strain was compounded by the fact Gollum generally travels on all fours. “I had to wear knee and elbow pads in the end because it was killing me.”

Is an Oscar nomination possible? Serkis smiles.

“There’s been talk about it,” he says. “People really responded well to the character.”