'Lord of the Rings' actor shares how his cat inspired famous voice

It couldn't have been any more PURRfect!

Recently, at PopCon, the premiere pop culture convention in Indianapolis, I had the honor of sitting down with legendary actor Andy Serkis to discuss his career and moderate questions from his fans.

As a "Lord of the Rings" fan, imagine my surprise when he revealed that the iconic voice of Gollum was created in a moment inspired by his cat!

Now, I wish I could say it was because of a graceful, loving or majestic moment between Andy and his beloved cat, Diz, but no, it was actually a hairball that inspired Andy!

Andy explains, "I wanted something that was constrictive in the throat. And then I started to think, but I need a physical kind of sense of what's propelling him when he speaks. And so literally at that moment in time, my cat at the time who is no longer with us, Diz, walked into the kitchen and started coughing up fur balls. And I was watching him, and his whole spine was kind of rippling."

Andy went on to say that he immediately realized that was useful. You have to watch the video to get the full effect but he added, "As I was watching Diz, I started to kind of go, bleh, bleh, bleh. And then that then became, gollum, gollum, gollum, my precious!"

I know I'll never watch "Lord of the Rings" the same way again. I'm grateful to Diz, the cat who played such a big role in helping her famous dad bring one of pop culture's greatest characters to life!

And the next time one of my cats has a hairball, I'm most definitely going to respond with "My precious!"

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