TORONTO - When it’s your full-time job to do impressions of characters in Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings, it’s hard to find appropriate places to hone your noisy craft.

So it was that for Charles Ross — whose One-Man Star Wars Trilogy and One-Man Lord Of The Rings play the Harbourfront Centre World Stage: Flying Solo fest next week — Gollum was born in a truck in Chicago.

“Gollum is really the most important voice in Lord Of The Rings. The show hinges on it, and I was finding it a real challenge,” the Vancouver actor says.

“I actually ‘got it’ while I was sitting in a truck in Chicago while my roommate was getting a taco.” Ross was performing the Star Wars Trilogy in Chicago and working out LOTR on the side.

“The problem with what I do is I have to speak out loud and in full voice at performance level in order to see if I’m going to be able to get the voice for real. And there are only so many occasions where you’re able to do that without people thinking you need medication.”

As we speak, Ross is en route to Cedar Rapids, Iowa — an example of the sort of place he’s been booked to entertain the locals since signing with the William Morris Agency in the U.S. It’s been four years since the fringe fest debut of his uncanny Star Wars Trilogy, a series of imaginatively acted thumbnail scenes, impressions and wry asides (Example: When the James Earl Jones-voiced Darth Vader finally lifts his helmet, a surprised “Luke” says “I thought you were black!”).

And for the past three years, the shows, which carry on under agreements with Lucasfilm and the J.R.R. Tolkien estate, have been his sole source of income and the reason he’s been on the road 200-plus days a year.

“You’d be surprised at the places I’m going to, a lot of smaller cities, like Indianapolis, and places you don’t think of as cities at all... like Cedar Rapids,” he adds with a laugh. There’s also a fair number of “Comic Cons” as well as a recent Lord Of The Rings festival in Pasadena, Cal. “It’s all some booking strategy, and frankly, I don’t care, I just do the show.”

And no, Ross — whose career has seen him through stints in theatre companies across the country — did not even vaguely envision this turn of events. “To me this was a s---s and giggles kind of project,” he says of Star Wars (he debuted Lord Of The Rings last year). “I thought I’d get one or two performances out of it, most people would find it funny and the rest would be scratching their heads. I really didn’t think it would go far at all.”

These days, he says, William Morris is booking more Star Wars shows than LOTR — with an eye toward next month’s release of the final Star Wars movie Revenge Of The Sith. Interestingly, he’s thought about incorporating the new Star Wars films into his act but says he probably won’t follow through.

“It (the new Star Wars) is definitely not as over-the-top as the old ones. The old ones revelled in that kind of B-movie quality. (The first movie) also had Sir Alec Guinness, this great Shakespearean-trained actor, along with Peter Cushing, who was also kind of an icon. It was just so easier to mock... well, not necessarily mock, but love that bizarre quality and campiness. The new Star Wars films lack the camp.”

In fact, he has a fan poll on his website to choose his next one-man show. The Matrix leads, followed by Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Spider-Man and Harry Potter. He leans toward Potter. “Again, it’s these extreme characters with extreme voices, played by great actors. It’s nice to get your talons into stuff like that.”

And after that? “I haven’t the foggiest idea where this will end up. I don’t think I’m going to be teaching university courses on how to condense films into one-person shows.

“I just hope in the end I still have my sanity and self-respect.”