‘The Hunt For Gollum’: Andy Serkis Admits To “A Little Bit” Of AI Use For De-Aging Actors, Defends Lack Of Diversity Among Main Cast

After producer Peter Jackson talked-up the potentinal benefit of AI use in the industry, “Lord of The Rings: The Hunt for Gollum” star and director Andy Serkis is now revealing they ARE, in fact, going to be using AI technology on the film when it comes to digitally de-aging actors in the film and also has some thoughts about why there isn’t any real diversity among the line-up of actors (such as Serkis, Jamie Dornan, Ana Taylor-Joy, Kate Winslet, Leo Woodall, Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen) he’s selected to particupate in the spinoff feature film.

Despite a competing version of Middle-Earth on Prime Video having a diverse group of actors with The Second Age series “The Rings of Power” (Season 3 on the way), Serkis, who is already into filming “The Hunt For Gollum,” shared with BBC News (while promoting his animated film “Animal Farm“) his own reasoning for it, which might irk people since he’s sort of placing that at the feet of J.R.R. Tolkien (although, the main gist of the books are about diversity/unity beating back the threat of darkness).

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“[J.R.R.] Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology; there’s a lot of that feeling. The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know…They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in. “Yes, there have been criticisms,” Serkis said, acknowledging that some of these arguments that are now almost a quarter of a century old. “This particular film is somewhat acknowledging that. But we don’t think we will be doing a politically correct, just-casting-for-the-sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film. So, it’s only where relevant basically.”

While Tolkien was indeed inspired by Norse and Old English mythologies (high fantasy worlds aren’t one-to-one with Norse lore), his works were influenced by a lot of different cultures (in the books, some hobbits did have brown skin countering Serkis’ all-white sentiment of the Shire), and Serkis’ isolationist viewpoints sound more like a personal opinion and potentially a reactionary “anti-woke” postering than anything else (possibly has to do with “The Rings of Power” seeing a heap of online hate for hiring black actors to play elves, dwarves, harfoots, and Númenóreans).

That’s not the only controversial thing happening surrounding “The Hunt for Gollum,” as Serkis has now revealed during a chat with Variety that they are going to be incorporating AI “a little bit” to help de-age actors (granted they’re not going to look like they did in the early 2000s), but is quick to point out they’re not creating straight-up generative-AI shots in the movie.

“There’s a little bit of de-aging for some of the characters, and machine learning is part of the process,” Serkis told the outlet. “When you think about it, in the original ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, Peter [Jackson] created MASSIVE, which was a program [that] allowed 1000s of orcs to all have their own individual mindset. So that is a brilliant example of an incredible use of AI. But we’re not creating AI shots in our movie; every shot is created in a traditional way. One of the things actually that I really wanted to do with this film was to bring back all of the great filmmaking skills, from miniatures to prosthetics, and marry them up, because that’s my taste. I like it when you mix up different filmmaking techniques.”

Back in May, Peter Jackson, while attending the Cannes Film Festival, said (via THR) that AI was “just a tool like any other,” which had concerned some that the filmmaker who started WETA Digital could be putting his artists in harm’s way by incorporating the would-be job-killing technology.

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“AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool,” Jackson said. “But like anything, it’s going to come down to the imagination and originality of the person, you know, feeding the instructions into the AI program.” We’ll have to wait to see if they end up using AI more in the post-production process or beyond what Serkis is claiming; only time will tell.