Here you will find the answers to the questions interviewers most frequently ask Sean Astin:

Q: How did you become involved with The Lord of the Rings?

A: Originally it was Peter Jackson`s name, not Tolkien`s trilogy, that drew me to the project. I knew of, but hadn`t read, the books. Jackson, on the other hand, was known to me because he had directed my father John in The Frighteners. I had also been impressed by what I`d seen of Jackson`s spoof documentary, Forgotten Silver. Dad showed me the ‘documentary’ and I was like, `Wow! We should be showing this to CNN and CBS. This is going to change history.` Then Dad started laughing and I was like, "Oh no. This is a rouse. This is bullshit. And then I thought: `This director is so talented.’

Q: How much weight did you put on to play Sam – or how much did you take off?

A: Well, I'm like the universe; either expanding or contracting at any given moment. The most that I had put on was about 35, 36 pounds, and I've taken all of that off. My goal was to get down to 155, which is what I'm at now. In June, when we did the retakes, I was 196. So, yeah, it's been a considerable amount of effort, and discipline, and hard work, and pain, to get it all off. But I don't want to play the fat guy or the friend for the rest of my life.

Q: What was it like to film scenes with a computer-generated Gollum?

A: I think it's fair to say that it's been the first time in movie that a totally CG character has been an actor-driven performance, rather than animators who are working on something. Usually what happens, to my knowledge, is an actor will come in and lay down a track, the animators will have done sketches early on, then the animators will go to work for eight months and kind of shape the performance of the character, and then the actor will come in and do a kind of ADR to sort of fit, ultimately, what the animators did. Maybe, to a greater or a lesser extent, Katzenberg has gotten movie stars to come in to work with the animators, but this guy, Andy Serkis was there, every single day that we were filming, and he was wearing this green Lycra suit, so he looked kind of retarded...

Q: We'll mention that, when we see him.

A: He knows, he knows. He doesn't look retarded today, he looks cool today. But this guy showed up on the set, with such passion and intensity – I mean, it was a little scary, actually. He was so focused and determined, he knew how important this character was to the story, and how, for Tolkien fans, how beloved the character is, and it was like his skin was stretched too tight on his skull, he was like popping out of it. His eyes were popping out, he was so into what he was doing. Peter recognized that, and decided early on that he wanted to allow the actor to drive the performance, and so every scene was rehearsed, every scene was staged, and in fact, every scene was filmed with Andy, once, and then he would step out and we would do the mime pass. Then the animators would literally, if they used a scene where he grabs you by the shirt, they could use a shot of him, and just paint Gollum over Andy's hand – or, if there was too much movement, or it just didn't work for whatever reason, they could use the mime pass and draw Gollum into it.

Q: The mime pass is you filming the same scene twice?

A: The same scene twice, two versions, so you shoot it until you get the – they called it the reference pass. It was funny, there was a little bit of a thing, the crew was used to the idea of working with a CG element, because we would do Shelob or the cave troll, or something like that. The mentality was, we'll do the reference pass, and then we'll do the hero pass, with nothing in there, where you're really going for it. They started using the same lexicon when Andy was there, and it really bummed him out, because he was fiercely protective of his kind of ambassadorship of this character. He was the Gollum team leader, and so he didn't want them to refer to it as the reference pass. As far as he was concerned, this was where the performance for that character was being created, and then he, through all of the post-production, he was there ... he worked, he wanted to make sure that every single animator ... 200 guys and girls, flown in from all over the world ... and they'll have a meeting in an auditorium, where Randy Cook, who won the Oscar last year for digital effects last year, and then they'll go away. It's really hard, to have a synthesized, cohesive, Unitarian approach to the character, and Andy wanted to make sure that every single animator knew what his kind of emotional ark for the character was, in each scene. And he did, and you can see. What I thought when I saw the movie was, "Oh my God, they've captured Andy." They literally redesigned the structure of the face of the character. They reanimated it, so that it would match the muscle structure, the bone structure of Andy's face...

When people had first described Gollum, to us on the set, he would describe things that were almost superhuman, that only an animated character could do, like, "Oh, Gollum's going to sort of flip over your back, and he'll jump on you and you'll have to respond to that," and I remember when he would describe it, it kind of bummed me out, because it didn't seem real. I haven't been a real fantasy fan my whole life, I haven't really gone in for wizards and all that ... and now it feels like history or something when you're doing it. That's the approach; the technology is so good, and the level of detail was so authentic. The swords are real, they actually had a blacksmith forge these swords so that when you hold it, it's heavy in your hand, it's not fake.

Q: You and the other actors became really close in the course of the filming – are you sort of prepared, are you ready to move on from this, or what are your feelings as you see the end of this in sight?

A: It goes through cycles and phases. At the end of the press tour last year, and the beginning of the awards season, there was a combination of not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, and not wanting to be ungrateful for the accolades and the reception that it was having, but also really not wanting to be stuck in Lord of the Rings for the rest of my life, and being desperate to kind of make sure that I could do something else with my life. Now, I just directed an episode of Angel, for the WB, I'm acting in Jeremiah, I've been doing animated voices for a couple of different movies, I've lost the weight ... now I feel like me again. Now, revisiting it this year, I don't feel stuck in it. I said yesterday, when it's all said and done, a year from March or April in 2004, when you walk into the book store and you don't see four different versions of Lord of the Rings, at the airport, or Time Magazine, it'll be a little sad. It'll be like that phase of being a part of a global, cultural phenomenon, and a huge kind of billion dollar studio franchise – that'll be over, and it'll be a little sad.