The Lord Of The Rings Star You Didn't Realize Played 2 Different Characters
Peter Jackson's monumental "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy features a lot of familiar faces. Many actors used the movies to launch their careers, as was the case with Viggo Mortensen (who portrays Aragorn) and Orlando Bloom (who plays Legolas). Others, like Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee (who played wizards Gandalf and Saruman, respectively), were veterans who added to their legacies by appearing in the beloved films.
Out of the massive list of actors involved with the gargantuan project, one stands out not because he rejected a role, nor because he accepted one — but because he accepted two.
John Rhys-Davies is famous for portraying the light-hearted, axe-wielding Dwarven warrior Gimli. He features heavily throughout all three films and is a major element of heroic actions and comedic relief. Rhys-Davies didn't stop with his on-screen character, though. He also brought his immense acting talent into the recording booth by voicing the lines for the Entish leader, Treebeard.
If you listen closely, you can hear the similarity in the voices. However, it takes a purposeful ear to notice that it's the same person. Gimli is much more in line with the British actor's normal voice, whereas his Treebeard lines are delivered slowly and layered with deep, reverberating, resinous tones.
John Rhy-Davies struggled with both of his roles in different ways
Playing Gimli would seem to be more difficult than Treebeard. The Dwarf has more screen time, a lot of lines, and participates in choreographed fight sequences. The actor also had to work plastered head to toe in makeup — which was particularly challenging for him since he reacted to the stuff, and it even made him feel physically ill at times.
In comparison, to the untrained eye, voicing Treebeard merely took a mic. And yet, when Rhy-Davies was asked about his experience, he reported Treebeard, not Gimli, was particularly challenging to play. "Treebeard is one of the very few parts that I've had that I wake up in a sweat at night thinking, 'I don't know how to play this,'" the actor explained in an interview at East European Comic Con in 2013 (via GameSpot). He went on to declare that Treebeard, of all roles, was the hardest part he's ever done, going so far as to admit that the end result doesn't sound like the book version. "I don't know how to play it, and it's not right," he said. "It's not the way it is in the book ... I could find no way ... how the hell do you voice something that has no lungs?"
The actor compared his experimentation with the slow, monotonous voice to whale noises, adding that it's much harder to act out the lines in real time than to read them on a page. Despite the actor's misgivings, his performance is one of the better verbal iterations of the lungless arboreal leader. It's doubly impressive, too, since it came while he was juggling another major character in the same story.