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In any conversation about the Lord of the Rings movies, it’s only a matter of time before someone does an impression of the Gollum voice. And why not? Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum is one of the highlights of Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy.  Gollum’s delivery of the line “my precious” has become a part of our pop culture.

It turns out, it’s all because of a cat.

Speaking to a crowd at Fan Expo San Francisco 2024, Serkis shared the story about how his cat helped inspire Gollum’s iconic voice.

“Motion capture aside, I just approached it like any other role. Getting into the psychology as you say, and physicality and voice. So, I started thinking about the guilt Gollum felt from killing his cousin, and where it was trapped, and I decided it was trapped in his throat.”

That’s when Dizz the cat came in and changed everything. “As I was working on the voice, and this is true, and many of you may know this, my cat Dizz came into the kitchen where I was working on the character and started to cough up a furball. I saw his spine kind of rippling and he started to [makes Gollum noise]. That is exactly where he came from.”

“My entire career, I owe to my cat,” Serkis added.

Gollum was one of Serkis’ first motion caption roles. At the time, the technology was new, with Serkis and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson acting as early pioneers.

“Originally, what it was explained, it was just going to be the voice. When I auditioned and met Peter Jackson, he explained that they were just on the verge of trying out this new technology called motion capture, and he wanted an actor to be on set to act with the other actors, because up to that point many CG characters were only represented by a tennis ball on a stick and actors had to pretend that they were having a relationship with it.”

Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is expected to hit theaters in 2026.

Whether you're Shirefolk, Elven, Dwarven, or something else, there's a good reason to love Lord of the Rings. We do! With that in mind, we have a dragon's horde of goodies for you from a Lord of the Rings reading guide, a Lord of the Rings watch guide, details on the upcoming animated film Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim, a full the Lord of the Rings reunion panel you can watch, how the OG Hobbit actors stay in touch every day on a groupchat, and the true message of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, according to Gimli himself - John Rhys-Davies.