Wwhenever a troll walks into a TV show or movie, I always wring my hands and think: “Now the party’s started.” Their enormous power and tiny brains make trolls some of the cutest characters to appear on screen. Look at that one punch slowly castle. Oh, someone has thrown a sword directly into his eye. Watch as he nearly crushes our heroes on their endless way down. Good stuff.
With the second season of Amazon’s The Rings of Power with a hill troll called Damrod lumbering around, now is the perfect time to reevaluate these massive creatures. Specifically: if you are asked to portray someone as an actor, what do you do?
“We had a little difficulty at the beginning because: how do you play a troll? How do you move?” This is William Kircher, who played Tom, one of the three cave trolls in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey by Peter Jackson. Kircher was lucky enough to portray not only Tom; like the two other actors in the troll sequel, he also doubled as a dwarf in the Hobbit trilogy (and was paid two separate fees for his troubles).But, although his dwarf Bifur was to all intents and purposes only a small man to the barber, his troll role was a bit more thoughtful. “It was bloody hard work,” he says. “There’s no easy way to play a troll.”
To some extent, this is because no one really agrees on what they are like – apart from their habit of turning to stone in the sunlight and living under bridges or in caves. There is no consensus, for example, on how big a troll should be. Although the giant creatures have been in some recent iterations – in the 2022 Norwegian film Troll, the eponymous character is over 300 feet tall – typically trolls can be a giant or something like that. Tolkien no doubt intended his trolls to be large – he describes their legs as being as thick as tree trunks – but even within his writings they may have been between nine and 30 feet tall. . Thanks to the prominence of Jackson’s six films, these images of trolls are the most available to us. And, although the Trolls animated film series gave them a contemporary revival, the lingering impression is of a gray and grumpy monster.
What helped Kircher – and his co-stars Mark Hadlow and Peter Hambleton, who played the trolls Bert and William respectively – was the involvement of Terry Notary, the man responsible for much of the movement work in Planet of the Apes. movies. Wearing green camouflage suits with lots of dots on them, the men worked with Notaire and Jackson to find a physical language for the trolls. But it was on the second day, when Andy Serkis visited the gang, that Kircher had a minor fate.
Kircher says Serkis told him: “Maybe you should think about what injuries, disabilities they might have in terms of movement.” In response, Kircher tied a sandbag to his left leg and two of his left arms, which left him numb on one side. He couldn’t keep this up while jumping around the room for 10 hours, but it was great for demonstrating the troll’s lumbering movements, he says.
When the trio rehearsed and filmed using motion capture technology over several days, they were in a room the size of 12 squash courts put together, Hadlow says. “It was a lot of fun to do,” he says. “It was like being in a toy store.” Kircher remembers seeing digital models of the characters – early designs that had little to do with the final products. These were huge grotesque creatures that moved when the actors did. “You looked like a troll; as grotesque,” he says. It reminded him of making children’s theatre. “It was amazing how physical you have to be,” he says. “It’s very freeing as an actor to be able to go to those very real aspects of your work.”
“From the pictures,” says Hambleton, “we could understand that they were slow and lumbering but very powerful; huge compared to the dwarves and could probably squash them with little effort.” Hambleton practiced a sunken posture and scratched his back. The trolls in The Hobbit are obviously comic relief movies – bickering and dollible fools who sneeze and fall. The creatures were not only feared, says Hambleton, but pitiful. “They’re kind of lovable in their stupidity.”
This is not the role of Damrod the hill troll in The Rings of Power, says senior visual effects supervisor Jason Smith, who speaks and provides the movements for the creature. Smith just wanted to create a carbon copy of other trolls on the screen. He knew that Tolkien’s trolls are said to have been made in mockery of the ent, the humanoid trees. The Rings of Power team set the creature at about 16 feet tall. “Tolkien said that trolls are three things: strong, mean and dumb,” says Smith. Unlike Bert, William and Tom, who are funny characters in a story that Tolkien wrote for his children, Damrod is a mercenary that the audience is not meant to laugh at. It is impossible to shock him. He has seen it all.
Breaking Bad’s taciturn henchman Mike Ehrmantraut was a key point of reference when Smith and his colleagues created Damrod: the creature does not need to speak to do its job or to intimidate people. But, when they speak, how should the trolls sound? Kircher, Hadlow and Hambleton suggest that Tolkien wrote the trolls’ dialogue in the Cockney dialect. “The Cockneys were the criminal class,” says Kircher, who wanted his voice to be deep as a striking contrast to the deep and menacing voices of the other two.
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Smith, meanwhile, saw his troll a little differently. “When we were sketching it early on,” he says, “I couldn’t escape this impression that he was having a party.” He says his troll’s voice therefore has a “Scottish slant”. Did Shrek’s Scottish accent contribute to this decision, I wonder? Not consciously, he says.
So few people have played trolls on screen that the actors who have done so show that they respect and own the characters. “Playing a troll is a very unique profession,” says Hadlow. The Hobbit actors love to surprise the audience with the news that they were not only playing dwarves but also trolls. “There’s a joyous quality to that sequence,” says Hambleton proudly.
For Smith, the love of his troll character is expressed through remarkable attention to detail – features and characteristics that viewers may always be oblivious to. “If the sun is going to his right, he will be rubbing mud on his right,” he says. “You may never notice that. But my respect for the character is saying: ‘That’s what he would do.’” It’s a great example of the subtle consideration that went into life as a troll. Since these creatures never existed, it’s heartening to hear how seriously people have been putting their giant shoes on them for some time now.
#bloody #hard #work #16ft #trolley