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With The Rings of Power season 3 just a few months away, we Middle-earth fans might be focused on talking Balrogs and Swedish valleys. Next year, though, the one character that every lover of The Lord of the Rings is going to have on their minds is Gollum, as the Andy Serkis-directed The Hunt for Gollum comes to theaters for the holiday season. Ever since Serkis first put on the mocap suit to play one of Tolkien's most complex characters, he's been an absolute staple of pop culture - even the least nerdy among us surely understands a throaty cry for 'My precious.' However, as Serkis himself recently revealed, the cinematic Gollum we got and the cinematic Gollum that was originally planned were two very different characters.

Serkis was recently a guest on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where the mocap pioneer and Planet of the Apes star was given a chance to talk about how his Lord of the Rings character was really two personas baked into one. "They're alters," said the actor. "It's a sort of dissociative disorder, and one is there to cope for the other."

But those "alters" didn't exist when the cameras first started rolling. At least, not in the way we know them now.

"This evolved out of a lots of discussion with with Fran [Walsh] and Philippa [Boyens], the writers, and Peter [Jackson], obviously," began The Batman actor. "Early on in the script, [the difference] wasn't defined, so we had to really essentialize what it was that they represented. Sméagol became this brutalized younger brother to Gollum, who'd been shoved away into a box. He'd been sort of othered, and he'd been disliked. Gollum was the survivor. Gollum was the tough, brutal - 'We're going to get through this. We've got to get the Precious. We've got to get The Ring.'"

And since the distinction between Gollum and his kinder, less Ring-obsessed alter ego wasn't quite on the page yet, you might not be surprised to know that one of their most famous scenes was missing too. That is, the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers where Sméagol and Gollum have a back-and-forth face-off, with the one character speaking at different angles to give the illusion of two people arguing.

"When we were doing principal photography," Serkis revealed, "That scene didn't exist. That wasn't in the script, originally - that evolved out of a year of discussion. We went back for additional photography [...] there were seven pages of script in that scene that Fran and Phil wrote."

"We shot it on the mocap stage first," he continued, "Where you you're not worried about camera angles, you're just playing the whole thing. I was just playing them back and forth. Then we shot it on the set; I think it was the next day practically. Peter was very carefully choosing where it merges from being one into two characters having an argument with each other.

"It was the most incredible scene to play," the Middle-earth director concluded, "And one of my favorite scenes in the film."

The Lord of the Rings is streaming on HBO Max now. The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum comes to theaters December 17, 2027.

Whether you're Shirefolk, Elven, Dwarven, or something else, there's a good reason to love Lord of the Rings. We do! With that in mind, we have a dragon's horde of goodies for you:

• Lord of the Rings reading guide 
• Lord of the Rings watch guide
• The Lord of the Rings reunion panel you can watch 
• The OG Hobbit actors stay in touch every day on a groupchat 
• The true message of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, according to Gimli himself - John Rhys-Davies.