Viggo Mortensen – one of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy’s stars – has an open invitation to return for the planned prequel film.
If there’s one thing that JRR Tolkien loved it’s an appendix. His legendary trilogy of genre-defining fantasy novels, The Lord Of The Rings, featured many, many appendices which added detail to the world of Middle-earth.
With Tolkien’s trilogy of books having received their own definitive film adaptations courtesy of director Peter Jackson and lots and lots of talented collaborators in the early 2000s, any future stories based in Jackson’s spin on Middle-earth are going to stem from the details and narrative threads that Tolkien left in those numerous nuggets of story.
One such story thread is the hunt for Gollum, a piece of Middle-earth mythology that fans know about but only exists canonically in the faintest of detail. The events concern Aragorn’s hunt for the miserable creature at the command of Gandalf The Grey. As fans of the film know, Gollum possesses knowledge of The One Ring’s current bearer which could prove to be disastrous should that information fall into the hands of Mordor.
In Tolkien’s original work, fans are left with little more than this: ‘3009 – Gandalf and Aragorn renew their hunt for Gollum at intervals during the next eight years, searching in the vales of Anduin, Mirkwood, and Rhovanion to the confines of Mordor. At some time during these years Gollum himself ventured into Mordor, and was captured by Sauron.’ Those two sentences aren’t much to go on considering that the latter part was already featured in the first film of Jackson’s trilogy. Still, the pace the Amazon series runs at, it could get two seasons out of that.
Despite Jackson’s take on The Hobbit suffering greatly from stretching too little source material over too many films, the core creative team of Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are returning to Tolkien’s work again, adapting that small addendum into a single feature film. We’re hopeful that lessons will have been learned and hopefully, the mistakes of The Hobbit won’t be repeated. Fan interest is certainly there for this intriguing tale: a fan-made take on this story was made over a decade ago and has amassed some 14m views since its release.
Philippa Boyens has been chatting to The Playlist about the project and revealed that the core trio really want Viggo Mortensen to reprise his role as Aragorn. We know that the other two core actors are returning in the form of Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Andy Serkis as Gollum, with the latter also directing the film.
Speaking about Mortensen’s potential return, Boyens said: that “honestly, that’s entirely going to be up to Viggo, collaboratively and we are at a very early stage. I’ve spoken to Viggo, Andy [Serkis] has spoken to him, Peter [Jackson] has spoken to him, we’ve all spoken to each other and honestly, I cannot imagine anyone else playing Aragorn, but it will be completely and entirely up to Viggo.”
Given that the events of the film would occur chronologically around the time of 2001’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, Mortensen would have to look a couple of decades younger, and Boyens adds that digital touch-ups would be the key to getting that look, adding: “I know Andy wants to work with him, but also, we don’t see this as like, using A.I. [technology], this is about a digital make-up, and whether Viggo does it or will entirely depends on how good the script is. And he doesn’t have a script yet. So to be fair to Viggo, let’s see if we write a good enough role and that he can find enough in it to see that it’s a performance he wants to take on. After that, it’ll be between Viggo and Andy of how that is achieved.”
The question of whether digital de-ageing is good enough yet to pass the uncanny valley test is one that is still yet to be definitively answered but it’s a far, far better solution than recreating characters entirely with AI which is frankly, a shudder-inducing thought.
The next film to tackle the digital de-ageing problem is Robert Zemeckis’ Here which is said to rely heavily on the technology. That film launches in the UK in January so we’ll have a chance to judge for ourselves then. We’ll bring you more on The Hunt For Gollum as we hear it.
