I could’ve sworn Andy Serkis was toying with me.

He’d been talking about The Hobbit for the past 10 minutes but I hadn’t heard a single thing. I was mesmerised by the shiny golden ring on his finger that he’d been waving in my face.

Controlling my impulse to lunge at the actor and, well, bite off his finger, pluck the ring off and do a jig before falling off the ledge inside a volcano (if ever there was one nearby), I did the next proper thing under these circumstances.

“Hey, Andy, what’s that on your finger?” I asked nicely.

He pauses. “Oh, it’s my wedding ring.”

Then, without missing a beat, he looks at me hard with those big eyes of his. “This is my very special precious.”

You can’t really out-Gollum Gollum, can you?

HOOKED ON HOBBIT

Still, it was worth a go. After all, it’s not every day you get to sit beside the most lovable despicable creature from your childhood. Or for that matter a bunch of other characters from a movie based on a book that pretty much changed your life.

Yes, short of reciting poetry in Elvish and growing hair on my feet, I’m one of those hardcore J R R Tolkien fans, and The Hobbit (subtitled Or There And Back Again, if you want to be precise) was my first step into geekdom. I admit it took me a number of times to get past the first couple of pages (the description of a house can be excruciatingly boring for an 11-year-old) but when I did, I was hooked. It had dwarves! It had elves! It had a dragon!

The Hobbit had been my bible that year — until I bumped into a classmate who, when I told him about my new discovery, scoffed as only 11-year-olds can.

“That’s for kids,” pooh-poohed Jonathan. “You mean you haven’t read The Lord Of The Rings?”

He always had dirty fingernails and boogers in his nose, anyway.

I’ve since thought of LOTR as the more superior work, but I’ve always had a soft spot for its more kiddie counterpart (kids back then didn’t know what on earth a “prequel” was). And now you’ve got The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hitting the big screen.

The first instalment in a movie trilogy sees Bilbo Baggins (played by Martin Freeman) and a group of dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) who, together with the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), go off on a pretty fun adventure involving getting kidnapped by goblins, and waylaid by wolves and trolls. Which is just halfway through the book, mind you.

WALKING A TIGHTROPE

And going by director Peter Jackson’s impressively massive take on LOTR a decade ago, you couldn’t have picked a better person to pull off The Hobbit — or someone as geeky for that matter.

“Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in 1937 as a children’s book, which was very successful when it came out and the publisher asked him to write a sequel. But he started writing a new story which, 18 years later became The Lord Of The Rings, which turned into a massively darker adult story. But some of the events in The Hobbit do continue on and obviously Bilbo getting the ring is one of the key events in The Lord Of The Rings. But The Hobbit in itself is a separate story about the dwarves reclaiming their homeland,” said this particular lord of the Rings franchise, geeking out on unsuspecting fellow journalists.

Even while he has managed to sneak in a couple of producing and directing gigs in-between the Tolkien trilogies (King Kong, District 9, The Lovely Bones and The Adventures Of Tintin), it has been a long, continuous trek across Middle-earth for the Kiwi, who sees the two sets of films to be part of a bigger cinematic landscape.

“As a film-maker, I wanted to walk the tightrope between the two (trilogies). To honour the slightly lighter, more comical children’s origins of The Hobbit and to have a unity with The Lord Of The Rings — so if some crazy people would want to watch all of them all as a run, they’ll make perfect sense.”

That would be me, of course.

A SORT OF HOMECOMING

For some of the cast, The Hobbit shoot was basically a homecoming. The venerable McKellen, who plays the familiar wizard, is still sporting a green stone necklace he had gotten from New Zealand, where all the movies were filmed.

“It’s a bit of New Zealand to bring me luck,” he explained. “There were people who are new to the cast who ask me what it was like the last time (in LOTR). But beyond the camera, it was the same people, which was astonishing. The big difference is that this time we knew we were making a film for an audience who desperately wanted it.

“We were tweeting yesterday and we trended. ‘Ian McKellen is trending.’ Do you know what that means?” he asked eagerly.

Yes, Gandalf, we do. Now can you do your wizard frown for our Instagram shot?

Of the Middle-earth noobs, the one who bagged the biggest (in a sense) new role was Armitage. As Thorin Oakenshield, he puts the “sexy alpha male” in “dwarf king”. He also needed no introduction to the world of fantasy, having grown up on works by C S Lewis and Tolkien.

“The thing that I love about Tolkien is that he captures something in a child’s imagination that I still feel as an adult — the idea of a secret door, the journey, getting lost, codes, passwords, magic. I still love those ideas.”

The 1.9m tall Hugh Jackman doppelganger also apparently loves transforming into his stunted hirsute rockstar role. “The first time I put the prosthetics on, I shut my eyes and didn’t want to look. It took three-and-a-half-hours and when I saw myself, it felt strange not to recognise what’s looking back at you — but it was also kind of moving. It was Thorin. And then I found it difficult to go to work without the hair.”

no BILBO PRESSURE

One guy who had no problems involving hair was Serkis, who makes a somewhat brief cameo as Gollum.

But instead of doing just that one pivotal cameo involving the One Ring and Bilbo Baggins on the very first day of shooting, he found himself hanging out much longer than expected — 266 days, in fact — as a newly-promoted second unit director (aka Jackson’s right-hand man).

“I didn’t expect to step into (helping direct) the biggest film in the world — it was like being given a Lamborghini before you passed your driving test, you know?”

Serkis did, however, have a bit of trouble getting under his creature’s skin. “My inner Gollum! He’s my Dorian Gray, you know what I mean?” he quipped. “The weird thing about coming back is not feeling I’ve owned it. When it’s out in the public consciousness to such a 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.”

All eyes however will be on main dude Martin Freeman, who takes over from Ian Holm’s rendition of Bilbo Baggins in the first trilogy as the younger version of the reluctant hero. While he doesn’t feel any “Bilbo pressure”, the actor, whose other iconic roles include Tim Canterbury in The Office, and John Watson in Sherlock, said he’s aware of how big this gig was.

“It’s by a team who has made three fantastic films in this universe, Middle Earth, which I very much admire. And now playing a central character in three (more) of those is, of course, very attractive.”

Yes, yes, we all knew that. But after being foiled by his own slimy nemesis earlier in the day, I just had to have one more dig at these Middle-earth denizens.

“Hey, Martin, did you get to keep anything from the shoot? Something shiny perhaps?”

Freeman looks confused. “I kept a couple of ears; Sting, my sword; the contract that I signed ...” And then it hits him. “Nope, they didn’t give me the Ring.”

Darn it. One can’t even out-Gollum Gollum’s mortal enemy.

Baggins, we hates it forever!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens in cinemas tomorrow. For our complete interview with “Gollum”, visit Rated G

(http://blogs.todayonline.com/ratedg/)