BWhenever a troll appears on a TV show or movie, I rub my hands together and think, “Now the party starts.” Their immense strength and tiny brains make trolls some of the most delicious and fun characters to see on screen. Check out this one, slowly pounding away at a castle. Oh, someone just threw a sword right into his eye. Watch him nearly crush our heroes on his endless journey down. Good stuff.

With the second season of Amazon’s The Rings of Power with a mountain troll named Damrod trotting around. Now is the perfect time to revisit these giant creatures. More specifically, if you, as an actor, are asked to portray one, what do you do?

“We had a few problems right from 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 play more than just Tom; like the other two actors in the troll sequence, he also played a dwarf in the Hobbit trilogy (and was paid two different salaries for it). But while his dwarf Bifur was basically just a little man who had never been to the barber, his troll role required a little more thought. “It was bloody hard work,” he says. “There’s no easy way to play a troll.”

That’s partly because no one really agrees on what they’re like – aside from their habit of turning to stone in sunlight and living under bridges or in caves. There’s no consensus on how big a troll should be, for example. Although the creatures have been huge in some recent versions – in the 2022 Norwegian film Troll, the titular character is over 300 feet tall – canonically, trolls can actually be giants or dwarves. There’s no doubt that Tolkien wanted his trolls to be big – he describes their legs as thick as tree trunks – but even in his writings they can be anywhere from 9 to 30 feet tall. Thanks to the notoriety of Jackson’s six films, these images of trolls are the most readily available to us. And although they have been given a contemporary makeover by the Trolls animated series, the impression of a grey and sullen monster remains.

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 in Planet of the Apes. Movies. Dressed in grey motion capture suits with lots of dots, the men worked with Notary and Jackson to find a body language for the trolls. But it wasn’t until the second day, when Andy Serkis paid the gang a visit, that Kircher made a small breakthrough.

Kircher says Serkis told him, “Maybe you should think about what wounds, what limitations in movement they might have.” In response, Kircher tied a sandbag to his left leg and two to his left arm, causing numbness on one side. He couldn’t keep that up while he was jumping around the room for 10 hours, but it was great for portraying the lumbering movements of a troll, he says.

As the trio rehearsed and filmed for several days using motion capture technology, they were in a room the size of 12 squash courts combined, Hadlow says. “It was so much fun,” he says. “It was like being in a toy store.” Kircher remembers seeing digital models of the characters – early drafts that had little to do with the final products. They were giant grotesque creatures that moved when the actors did. “You saw yourself as a troll, as a grotesque,” he says. It reminded him of children’s theater. “It was amazing how physical you have to be,” he says. “As an actor, it’s very liberating to be able to live out these really, really extreme aspects of your work.”

“From the pictures,” says Hambleton, “we could see that they were slow and clumsy, but very strong; huge compared to the dwarves, and could probably crush them with very little effort.” Hambleton slumped and scratched his bottom. The trolls are clearly comical interludes in The Hobbit Movies – quarrelsome and gullible fools who sneeze and fall over. The creatures are not only to be feared, says Hambleton, but also to be pitied. “In their stupidity they are somehow lovable.”

This is not the role played by Damrod, the mountain troll, in The Rings of Power, says Jason Smith, the lead visual effects supervisor who provides the creature’s voice and movements. Smith didn’t want to simply create a copy of other trolls on screen. He knew that Tolkien’s trolls were supposedly a mockery of the Ents, the human-like trees. The Rings of Power team decided to make the creature about 18 feet tall. “Tolkien said trolls are three things: strong, mean and stupid,” Smith says. Unlike Bert, William and Tom, who are funny characters in a story Tolkien wrote for his children, Damrod is a mercenary who isn’t meant to make audiences laugh. It’s impossible to shock him. He’s seen it all.

The silent henchman of Breaking Bad Mike Ehrmantraut was a key reference point when Smith and his colleagues created Damrod: The creature doesn’t need to speak to do its job or intimidate people. But what should trolls sound like when they speak? 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, in stark contrast to the deep and menacing voices of the other two.

Smith, however, saw his troll a little differently. “When we sketched him in the beginning,” he says, “I couldn’t help but feel that he was wearing a kilt.” He says that’s why his troll’s voice has a “Scottish accent.” I wonder if Shrek’s Scottish accent influenced this decision? Not consciously, he says.

Since there are comparatively few people who play trolls on screen, the actors who have done so show a real affection and devotion to the characters. “Playing trolls is a very, very unique profession,” says Hadlow. The Hobbit Actors like to surprise their audiences with the news that they are playing not only dwarves, but also trolls. “There’s something joyful about this scene,” says Hambleton proudly.

Smith expresses his love for his troll character through a remarkable attention to detail—facets and features that audiences may never notice. “When the sun is to his right, he rubs mud on his right side,” he says. “You may never notice that. But I owe the character the respect to say, ‘That’s what he would do.'” It’s a great example of the subtle considerations that go into imagining what it might be like to live as a troll. Considering these creatures never existed, it’s a joy to hear how seriously people took stepping into their giant shoes for a while.