Andy Serkis gets under the skin of Gollum in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

Congratulations on landing your gig as Peter Jackson’s second unit director. How did you get it? Peter’s known that I’ve wanted to direct for a long time—as far back as Lord Of The Rings I was doing short films and then, after King Kong, I was directing video game projects and theatre. Then I set up Imaginarium, a performance capture studio in London, and I was about to direct my first feature, Animal Farm, and then the call came.I was only supposed to go back to New Zealand for two weeks to play Gollum and ended up going back for a year and a half. I think Peter wanted me to do that because obviously I’ve been through the Middle Earth experience before and knew the world and have worked with him over the last 10 years in various projects. How was it like then? The first outing for a director would (usually) be a 35-day shoot with a small group of actors and maybe one camera. I didn’t expect to step onto the biggest film in the world! It really was like being given a Lamborghini before you passed your driving test, you know? So what did you learn from him? As a director, it’s immeasurable. He’s obviously been a very inspirational mentor for me for many years. I’ve always admired about how everything is always about emotional truth—and yet it’s on a big canvas. No matter what’s going on, whether it’s a big battle sequence or the most incredible shot, it’s always about supporting the drama. What about going back to do Gollum. Was there any hesitation? I really didn’t have a choice! (laughs) I sort of knew for a long time that The Hobbit was in the offing. I’ve never really returned to play a character before—certainly not 10 years later. The weird thing about coming back to it is not feeling I’ve owned it. `Cos when you play a role, you really have to own that character. And when it’s out in the public consciousness to such degree that Gollum was, it was very hard to reel it back in and feel that he’s inside of me rather than of people’s impersonations of him. So you wanted to set free the Gollum inside of you? My inner Gollum! (laughs) He is my Dorian Gray, you know what I mean? Funny enough, when I saw the original sculpt of Gollum, when he was redesigned to fit my facial muscle structure, he looked exactly like my father. Very, very weird. `Cos I know what I’m gonna look like (in the future). I’m the only member of the cast who’s gonna grow like the character that they’ve played. Aside from Gollum, you’ve played a lot of these performance capture characters like in King Kong and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. How much of yourself do you put in these? When you’re playing characters like that, like Kong or Gollum or Caesar, they’re always aspects of yourself. Regardless of whether you’re playing a craven ring junkie or a 25 foot gorilla who’s lonely—it’s always your personality in these roles. People think performance capture is just about movements or creating a physicality or doing monkey movements. It’s nothing to do with that actually. It’s primarily acting, about embodying a character. Whether you’re wearing a costume or not is irrelevant. It’s about providing a life for your character. What do you think of a Gollum toy? I’ve fulfilled my life’s ambition to become a toy! Merchandising’s great, especially the way it’s created for a film like this and the level of detail—the designs from Weta Workshop, all of it finds its way in great detail to the merchandise. I actually think Tolkien would have really loved to see dolls made of the characters that he invented. That part of play, the world of the imaginary for him, is part of it. I think he’d enjoy seeing a model of Gollum or Gandalf or a doll of any of those characters.

This is what Andy Serkis looks like in real life. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is in cinemas on Thursday.