Whenever a troll enters a TV show or film, I always rub my hands and think: “Now the party’s started.” Their colossal power and tiny brains make trolls some of the most deliciously fun characters to witness on screen. Look at that one slowly punch a castle. Oh, someone’s just thrown a sword directly into its eye. Watch as it almost crushes our heroes on its never-ending way down. Good stuff.
With the second season of Amazon’s The Rings of Power featuring a hill troll called Damrod lumbering around, now is the perfect time to consider these massive creatures afresh. More specifically: if you’re asked to portray one as an actor, what do you do?
“We had a little bit of difficulty right at the start because: how do you actually play a troll? How do you move?” This is William Kircher, who played Tom, one of the three cave trolls in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Kircher was lucky enough to portray not just Tom; like the other two actors in the troll sequence, he also doubled up as a dwarf in the Hobbit trilogy (and got paid two separate fees for his trouble). But, while his dwarf Bifur was for all intents and purposes just a small man who had never been to the barber, his troll role took a little more thought. “It was bloody hard work,” he says. “There’s no easy way to play a troll.”
Partly, this is because no one really agrees on what they’re like – beyond their habits of turning to stone in sunlight and living under bridges or in caves. There is no consensus, for example, on how large a troll should be. Although in some recent iterations the creatures have been enormous – in the 2022 Norwegian film Troll, the eponymous character is more than 300ft tall – canonically trolls can in fact be giants or dwarves. There is no doubt that Tolkien intended his trolls to be large – he describes their legs as being as thick as tree trunks – but they might range from nine to 30ft high even within his writings. Thanks to the prominence of Jackson’s six films, these images of trolls are the ones most readily available to us. And, although the animated film series Trolls has given them a contemporary rehabilitation, the abiding impression is of a grey 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 the Planet of the Apes films. While wearing grey motion-capture suits with numerous dots on, the men worked with Notary and Jackson on finding a physical language for the trolls. But it was on the second day, when Andy Serkis paid the gang a visit, that Kircher had a mini-breakthrough.
Kircher says that Serkis told him: “Maybe you should think about what wounds, what disabilities they might have in terms of movement.” In response, Kircher tied a sandbag to his left leg and two to his left arm, leaving him feeling numb on one side. He couldn’t keep this up as he leapt around the room for 10 hours, but it was great for depicting the lumbering movements of a troll, he says.
When the trio rehearsed and filmed using motion capture technology over several days, they were in a room that was as large as 12 squash courts put together, says Hadlow. “It was such fun doing it,” he says. “It was like being in a toy shop.” Kircher remembers that they saw digital mock-ups of the characters – early designs that related little to the end products. These were huge grotesque creatures that moved when the actors did. “You saw yourself as a troll; as a grotesque,” he says. It reminded him of doing children’s theatre. “It was amazing how physical you do have to be,” he says. “It’s very freeing as an actor to be able to go to those really, really extreme aspects of your work.”
“From the pictures,” says Hambleton, “we could sense that they were slow and lumbering but very powerful; huge compared to the dwarves and could probably squash them with very little effort.” Hambleton practised a sunken posture and scratched his backside. The trolls are clearly comic relief in the Hobbit films – bickering and gullible fools who sneeze and fall over. The creatures weren’t just to be feared, Hambleton says, but pitied. “They’re kind of lovable in their stupidity.”
This isn’t the role that Damrod the hill troll plays in The Rings of Power, says senior visual effects supervisor Jason Smith, who voices and provides the movements for the creature. Smith didn’t want to simply create a carbon copy of other onscreen trolls. He knew that Tolkien’s trolls were said to have been made in mockery of the ents, the humanoid trees. The Rings of Power team settled on around 16ft for the creature’s height. “Tolkien said that trolls are three things: strong, mean and dumb,” Smith says. Unlike Bert, William and Tom, who are funny characters in a story Tolkien wrote for his children, Damrod is a mercenary whom the audience are not intended to laugh at. It is impossible to shock him. He has seen it all.
Breaking Bad’s taciturn henchman Mike Ehrmantraut was a key reference point when Smith and his colleagues created Damrod: the creature doesn’t need to talk in order to get his job done or intimidate people. But, when they do speak, how should trolls sound? Kircher, Hadlow and Hambleton point out that Tolkien wrote the trolls’ dialogue in a Cockney accent. “The Cockneys were the criminal class,” says Kircher, who wanted his voice to be snotty as a pronounced contrast to the deep and threatening voices of the other two.
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Smith, meanwhile, saw his troll a little differently. “When we were sketching him early on,” he says, “I couldn’t escape this sense that he was wearing a kilt.” He says that there is therefore a “Scottish slant” to his particular troll’s voice. Did Shrek’s Scottish accent inform this decision, I wonder? Not consciously, he says.
So comparatively few people have played trolls onscreen that the actors who have done so demonstrate a real sense of fondness and ownership of the characters. “Troll-playing is a very very unique profession,” says Hadlow. The Hobbit actors love surprising audiences with the news that they didn’t just play dwarves but trolls as well. “There’s a joyous quality about that sequence,” says Hambleton proudly.
For Smith, the love of his troll character is expressed through remarkable attention to detail – facets and traits an audience might always be oblivious to. “If the sun’s gonna be on his right, he’ll be rubbing mud on his right hand side,” he says. “You may never notice that. But I owe the character the respect of saying: ‘That’s what he would do.’” It’s a great example of the subtle consideration that has gone into what it might be like to live life as a troll. Given that these creatures never existed, it’s a delight to hear how seriously people have taken on the job of putting on their enormous shoes for a while.