Planet of the Apes star Owen Teague on finding his inner chimp and dodging scary Aussie spiders
In between dodging poisonous spiders while shooting Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in Australia, Owen Teague reveals how he learned his monkey moves
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When Owen Teague signed on to make Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in Australia, no one told him about the flesh-eating spiders.
The American actor, best known for appearing in screen adaptations of Stephen King’s It and The Stand, had some close encounters with Australia’s legendary creepy-crawlies while shooting the sci-fi blockbuster in and around Sydney in the summer of 2022-23.
But the one that freaked him out the most was when his unflappable (and over-exaggerating) driver flicked a scary-looking arachnid off Teague’s mask while returning from a long day on set and then casually informed him that it was a white-tailed spider.
“And I go ‘what’s a white-tailed?’ and he says ‘well, it bites you and you get necrosis of the flesh’,” recalls Teague, still looking a little queasy over Zoom call from his home in New York. “And I was like ‘Oh my God, this is terrifying’.
“Then, I almost sat on a funnel-web once – but the good thing about motion capture suits is that they are head-to-toe protection so I was never in that much danger.
“But we had PAs who would stand around in the mud and then they came off set and there would be seven leeches on their legs. Like, I’m from Florida and it was gnarly.”
Apart from protecting him against biting beasties, Teague’s performance capture suit – the skin-tight clothing covered in dots that enables computers to track his every movement and expression and turn them into a fully realised digital character – was the very reason he’d travelled to the other side of the world.
In KOTPOTA, the fourth film in the hit reboot of the beloved 1960s sci-fi franchise, Teague plays Noa, a young, resourceful and fearless chimpanzee, whose idyllic world is shattered when his peaceful tribe is enslaved by a power-hungry ape lord. Set 300 years after the events of the previous film, in a world where intelligence-enhanced apes have become the dominant species after a global virus has devolved most of humankind, it’s also the first one not to feature Andy Serkis.
In 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its two sequels, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War of The Planet of the Apes, Serkis played the chimpanzee leader Caeser, who united the apes against their human enemies.
Having already proved himself as the world’s leading proponent of performance capture acting as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the title character in Peter Jackson’s 2007 remake of King Kong, Serkis’s skills and the trailblazing digital technology of the Kiwi director’s Weta Digital combined for a performance that many at the time thought was award-worthy.
Indeed, it was Serkis’ performance as King Kong that first entranced the young Teague and opened his eyes to a whole new world of acting possibilities.
“I really gravitated towards was Beauty and the Beast as a kid when I was four years old,” Teague says. “And it wasn’t the human characters, it was the Beast. But that was an animated film and it was like ‘well, I can’t do that’. And then suddenly you could – and seeing Andy bring that much humanity and pathos to Kong without ever saying a word, that affected me so deeply as a child. I mean, it still does. I watch that movie now and that ending where he’s on the Empire State Building, I’m balling.”
When Serkis, described by KOTPOTA director Wes Ball as “our ape Godfather”, made himself available to Teague and some of the other key cast to share some of his insights on performance capture acting, he leapt at the chance. Apart from giving him technical pointers on how move and use his voice, Serkis helped to demystify the technology-heavy process with his “comforting advice that this is not anything crazy”.
“The most important thing that he said was to not treat it as something mysterious or different,” Teague recalls. “It’s not. You’re still playing a character. It’s just that character happens to have a different body than you and move differently. And that’s just a costume. Everything else you do the same way and that really showed me the way to approach Noa like I would anyone else.”
“Obviously it’s different than normal acting but only in the way that it is more than normal acting. It is normal acting plus this other thing that you’re also doing at the same time, which makes it more challenging, but also, I think more fun.”
While Serkis’ wise words were ringing in his ears, Teague was also undergoing six weeks of “ape school” in Sydney before shooting started, led by French artist Alain Gaulthier, a former Cirque Du Soliel performer. It wasn’t just about learning how grunt and hoot and holler like a chimp, or how to negotiate the leg extensions and bulky headgear, rather a more fundamental, inside-out approach.
“He started us with quite standard theatre training and physical training to help us get in touch with our movement and our bodies and then it became about creating a physical character who exists in the form of the ape but also is a reflection of the inner life,” says Teague.
“And that was what really struck me about his method of working is that everything revolved around the character. He wasn’t teaching us how to impersonate chimpanzees. He was helping us create a specific being, who had their own way of moving and their own way of talking and all of this stuff.”
Teague also says that the process of playing Noa helped him overcome “a bit of an existential crisis in terms of acting” and find the joy in his chosen profession once again. And while he doesn’t particularly enjoy watching himself on-screen says he was absolutely mesmerised once he saw the fully rendered digital version of Noa for the first time.
“I think it’s the first time I’ve been able to judge my performance with clear eyes,” he says. “But it’s 100% my performance. It’s so weird, these animaters are unbelievably talented because they’ve managed to capture things that only I do and that I recognise on screen as like ‘oh, that’s me – but it’s on a different face and a different body’. It’s totally mind-boggling and quite weird but also the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”
If all goes well, KOTPOTA won’t be the last time we see Teague as Noa, with very fertile grounds for sequels as the ape world and the human world learn to coexist – or not. Regardless, Teague is keen to return Down Under. As No. 1 on the call sheet, he says he literally worked every day but still managed to explore parts of Sydney and its surrounds from his Redfern base. One favourite activity was grabbing a couple of pizzas and a six-pack with some castmates and soaking up the atmosphere while looking down on Bondi Beach.
“I’m not a beer drinker, but everyone was like ‘it’s Australia you have to have a beer’ and I was like ‘all right’, so and we’d just go up there and just hang out and talk and play games and look at the sunset,” he says a little wistfully.
“It took me a minute, but once we started doing that. I was like ‘oh, I understand Australia now – I get what this is about’ and I’m very into it.”
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas on Thursday.
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