One of the most memorable moments in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers almost didn’t exist. Andy Serkis has revealed that the split-personality argument scene between Gollum and Smeagol was not in the original film script, as reported by Popverse.
The scene, in which Gollum and Smeagol hold an audible internal debate over Frodo and the One Ring, took roughly a year to develop alongside director Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. Early drafts of the script did not treat Gollum and Smeagol as clearly distinct internal personas. Walsh and Boyens eventually recognized the need to make the Ring’s psychological corruption visible on screen in a direct, dramatic way, and what emerged became a landmark moment for motion capture performance.
Tolkien had already laid the groundwork in the chapter “The Taming of Smeagol” in The Two Towers, where Samwise Gamgee overhears Gollum’s internal argument on the slopes of the Emyn Muil. Sam labels the two voices “Slinker” for Smeagol and “Stinker” for Gollum, capturing the creature’s fractured psyche through an outside observer’s ear. Jackson’s team took that auditory observation and externalized it fully, staging the two halves of Gollum as separate speakers facing each other in open argument. It is a bold adaptation choice, and knowing it was hard-won over a year of development only deepens the respect we have for what Serkis and the filmmakers built together.
Serkis is set to direct and star in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, scheduled for December 2027, a film that will place Gollum’s psychological complexity at its center.
