Many of the figures involved with the original trilogy of The Lord of the Rings films have shared their support of the new TV series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, with Gollum actor Andy Serkis recently offering his own reaction to the series. The actor largely praised the overall look of the series and the vibe it manages to capture, despite being a TV series, so while Serkis might not have necessarily shown his support for the specific storyline or overall direction of the project, his only comments were ones of encouragement for delivering the sweeping worlds of Middle-earth. He did also note that he was impressed by some of the performances.
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“I think it’s really beautifully crafted, I think there’s some really great performances in there,” Serkis shared with Jake’s Takes. “I recently did a reading of Lord of the Rings for Audible and in the preface, in the foreword, it covers The Rings of Power, the age they tell within The Rings of Power, so I was familiar with that world and I just think it’s a really beautiful rendition. And, again, having the time to be with those characters is something very, very exciting and I know the Lord of the Rings fans are loving it.”
He continued, “I really did enjoy — again, the scale is incredible. In terms of the cinematography, performances aside, it feels so epic and in the same way that this does, the same way that [Star Wars: Andor] feels like … You find it hard to separate it from the movies, they feel like movies, every single episode. It does have mythic and scale-wise epic nature to it in Rings of Power, in the same way that Andor does, it feels like a huge movie.”
Despite being involved in the Lord of the Rings franchise in a number of capacities, it sounds as though Serkis can sit back and enjoy the new series, as he’s not directly involved in it. Director of both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies Peter Jackson previously expressed his disappointment in how he can’t enjoy the films as a fan, having been so integral to their development, that he even considered hypnosis to remove those memories from his mind.
“When we did The Lord of the Rings movies I always felt I was the unlucky person who never got to see as a coming-out-of-the-blue film,” Jackson shared with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. “By the time there were screening I was immersed in it for five or six years. It was such a loss for me not to be able to see them like everyone else. I actually did seriously consider going to some hypnotherapy guy to hypnotize me to make me forget about the films and the work I had done over the last six or seven years so I could sit and enjoy them. I didn’t follow through with it, but I did talk to [British mentalist] Derren Brown about that and he thought he could do it.”
Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is now streaming on Prime Video.
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