First, you let Harry Potter himself read to you the very first chapter of Harry Potter. Now, allow Gollum to read to you the entirety of The Hobbit in one sitting—that’s right, all 287-320 pages of it (depending on your edition). To raise money for coronavirus relief efforts, actor Andy Serkis has announced that he’ll be embarking on a “12 hour armchair marathon across Middle Earth,” reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel “from cover to cover, there and back again.”
As Serkis explains on the #Hobbitathon GoFundMe page, fans can start tuning in on Friday, May 8 at 10 am BST (that’s 5 am EST and 2 am PST for early-birds in the US), with the link shared on GoFundMe and the actor’s social media prior to the reading. The target goal of the fundraiser is £100,000, which will be split evenly between two UK charities: Best Beginnings—which works with new parents, families with young children, pregnant families, babies, and toddlers—and NHS Charities Together, an umbrella organization for all the official charities of the UK’s National Health Service.
The live stream will start at 10am GMT (5am EST, 2am PST) Friday 8th May. The live-stream link will be posted on the GoFundMe page on Friday morning – and our team will post here as well.
— Andy Serkis (@andyserkis) May 7, 2020
In a teaser video released earlier this week, the actor also revealed that he’s currently hard at work doing edits for Venom 2, which he’s directing, and showed off an extremely true-to-scale Gollum puppet who apparently just hangs out in his office. (Watch until the end for a surprise.)
Join me for the Adventure this coming Friday, May 8. Stay tuned for more details on how you can support @NHSuk and @bestbeginnings pic.twitter.com/nxK11BTl4b
— Andy Serkis (@andyserkis) May 3, 2020
There’s no word yet on whether Serkis will be reading the whole thing in his Gollum voice.
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The Unconquered City
Wow that’s impressive! Chapeau!
I wish it weren’t a work day for me (though grateful to have work to do in these times). I wonder what time Chapter 5 will start…?
I really want to listen to it; but my shift starts exactly when he well start reading.
This sounds fun!
Mind you, it will be hard to better this one (even though it’s abridged):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RXC1miPm2c
Unfortunately, it seems unclear whether this will be recorded for people who can’t spend those 12 hours tomorrow listening to it, though lots of people are clamoring for that on his Facebook page. I’ve never visited his Facebook page before, and now I’m tempted to use it to inform him that I am Gollum’s greatest fan. Trouble is, people might contest that, and I’m appropriately possessive toward Gollum; I don’t like to think about sharing him with anyone except my close friends. Did anyone else spend literal years barely able to think about anything except Gollum and their adoration of him? If so, I want to be their friend. If not, I’d have to supress my urge to make the type of more-devoted-than-thou proclamations that shouldn’t be made in fandoms.
I personally hope Serkis doesn’t use his Gollum voice here, except for Gollum’s lines. That voice belongs to Gollum, not the other characters or any narrator who isn’t Gollum. And speaking in it for 12 hours nonstop would be a horrible pain in the throat for any human.
I think Gollum voice would be very very odd — he’d be forced to choose between not speaking like Gollum or not reading the book as written, cos Gollum’s idiosyncratic turn of phrase is very very different from Tolkien’s normal style of writing.
Reading the entire book in a Gollum voice would be absurd. And of course, he didn’t. Here is when Gollum emerged: