10 Movie Auditions That Changed Cinema Forever

10. Andy Serkis - The Lord of the Rings

It can't be understated just how much impact Andy Serkis' successful audition for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings franchise had on the landscape of modern blockbuster cinema as we know it.

Serkis' famously animated audition for the role saw him not only show off a fully-formed version of the "Gollum voice," but he also brought the character to life on tape through his facial expressions and overall physical movements.

And so, this prompted director Peter Jackson to scrap his original plan of having Gollum be a fully CGI character with the hired actor only providing the voice. 

Appreciating the physicality that Serkis brought to the part, Jackson additionally had him appear on set in a motion capture suit, in turn giving the VFX wizards at Weta Digital a huge pool of reference material when animating Gollum's movements and expressions.

This effectively paved the way for modern performance capture as we know it, where the slightest subtleties of an actor's work on set can transpire through to the final digital creation. 

And it all goes back to Serkis' original Lord of the Rings audition, where his fully committed performance gave Peter Jackson one hell of an idea.