Before Andy Serkis’ turn as Gollum/Smeagol in The Lord of the Ringstrilogy, motion capture had not been very widely used. It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since The Fellowship of the Ring was released, and now Serkis is synonymous with motion capture, but that wasn’t the case when he was making the Lord of the Rings film trilogy with director Peter Jackson.

Serkis, per PopVerse, appeared on a Lord of the Rings reunion panel at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) and talked about the reaction Jackson and the rest of the Lotr crew had to their first encounter with Serkis’ Gollum/Smeagol on set.

The actor/director recalled looking pretty silly in his motion capture suit at first. “These guys had been filming for about four or five months before I got out to New Zealand. I was going through the preparations for becoming Gollum,...