Andy Serkis: What a chimp
THIS IS the most famous face you don’t know. He is in the new Planet of the Apes, and has played Gollum and King Kong. So who is he and just what does he do?
ANDY Serkis might not be a household name like George Clooney or Matt Damon but he may well have the most famous face you don’t recognise.
That’s because his most successful roles have cloaked his features in dazzling computer animation.
From the groundbreaking Gollum in the Lord Of the Rings trilogy, to the title role in the hit 2006 remake of King Kong and now as the highly evolved ape Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot, Serkis has set the gold standard in motion capture performance.
While all the characters look wildly different, the movements — and increasingly the facial expressions — are all Serkis, thanks to the advances in technology that allow them to be accurately captured with special cameras and suits.
REVIEW: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The increasingly blurred line between live action and computer animation thanks to films such as Avatar and The Adventures of Tintin (in which Serkis also appeared as Captain Haddock) has raised questions as to whether the animators or the actors should take the credit for the performances in these special-effects laden movies.
“I’ve been very badly misquoted saying something horrendous like, ‘Andy Serkis thinks he does everything and the animators do nothing,’ which I would never say in a million years,” says Serkis.
It’s the morning after the successful debut of the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Serkis, whose name was greeted with a roar of approval as the credits rolled, is sipping his first cappuccino of the day at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton.
“The question is about authorship of a role,” he says. “Although the visual effects world and the work on this film is utterly extraordinary and a groundbreaking move forward, we have to look at why the audience feels what they do towards these characters. And that is purely because of the actors and their performances.
“Playing a character using performance-capture technology is only a technology; a bunch of cameras filming their performance. The audiences want to be moved, that doesn’t happen by a visual effect; that happens by an actor’s performance.”
For Serkis, his role as Caesar was a little less labour-intensive this time around.
“The physical toll was definitely much less,” he says. “Caesar is bipedal for most of the time and he rides a horse. He’s more human in his physicality so I’m not quadrupedaling as much as the other actors.“
Dawn, the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which itself was a reboot of the beloved and groundbreakingsci-fi franchise of the ’60s and ’70s) picks up 15 years later. Set in the near future after a simian virus has wiped out much of the human race — the relatively few survivors are played in part by Gary Oldman, Aussie Jason Clarke, and Keri Russell — Caesar is at the centre of a brewing war. Now he must act as arbitrator and linchpin of the interspecies conflict between the intelligent apes and humanity.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a surprise hit, grossed nearly $530 million worldwide in 2011; and cost around $99 million. Dawn, budgeted at $127 million, is expected to eclipse its predecessor’s numbers.
Serkis ponders the universal appeal of his iconic primate.
“Caesar’s a leader that listens, and he understands both human and ape worlds. He has strength and he certainly shows it when he needs to, and he uses force when he needs to, but he is an egalitarian leader. He’s an empathetic creature which is why he’s heroic.”
Serkis also enjoys life on the other side of the camera and founded The Imaginarium Studios with film producer Jonathan Cavendish (Bridget Jones franchise), a digital studio to further the technology of performance capture.
“It’s been a dream of mine since 2006 and it finally came to fruition two years ago. We’re creating a methodology for how actors are going to portray animals. Through Imaginarium we’re producing Animal Farm (based on the novel by George Orwell) and I’m also directing Jungle Book for Warner Bros. And similar to Apes, we’re using the anthropomorphisation of animals to say something about the human condition.”
JJ Abrams is also planning to use the Imaginarium for the upcoming Star Wars movies in which Serkis will have a part, but it’s so far unclear whether it will be a mo-cap role. He has also been working closely with Mark “Hulk” Ruffalo on The Avengers: Age Of Ultron, but is tight-lipped on his rumoured own role in the superhero sequel.
A father-son theme is prevalent in Dawn between Caesar and his offspring, River. Serkis himself is one of five siblings.
“I must admit, my relationship with my father is a complicated one, nothing original there,” he chuckles.
“He worked, lived and grew up in Iraq. My mother was English, a Special Ed. teacher of handicapped children. They had three daughters and when I was born my mum decided to come back to England and so I was brought up in the UK. But, my dad stayed there and built a hospital in what then became the Green Zone and so I had a very distant, quite a sort of Victorian relationship (with him) in many ways.
“I remember a huge silence on the end of the phone when I said that I wanted to become an actor,” he recalls, laughing. “My father lived until he was 92 and he died a couple of years ago. I think it’s easy to rebel, it’s classic, isn’t it? I did it and it was really only as my father was growing older that I had a desire to communicate with him.” He pauses. “I don’t know if I fully managed it.”
Serkis, 50, has been married to British actor Lorraine Ashbourne, 52, since 2002. They are raising their three children, Ruby, 15, Sonny, 13, and Louis, 10 in North London.
“We live a very normal life in England. We go for walks in the countryside and maybe have lunch in a pub, walk around London.”
Serkis does not exclusively perform as non-human characters. In 2010, for example, he portrayed both Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, and Mr Colleoni in Brighton Rock. His career began in theatre and then moved into television, when he appeared in such productions as The Darling Buds Of May (1992) and Oliver Twist (1999). His breakout role (as himself) came in 2008: Albert Einstein in Einstein and Eddington, though he had also acted in the likes of Loop (1997), and Topsy-Turvy (1999). It seems being the best in his particular niche is a double-edged sword.
“I don’t think what I do is special; I just act. With performance capture, there is no mystery to it. If you go back to the original 1968 Apes for example, if I was Andy Serkis playing Roddy McDowall’s part in the original, I would be wearing very thick makeup and a costume. I would be finding a way to be an ape and it would be exactly the same process as what I do now, or say, when Meryl Streep played Margaret Thatcher. When actors transform, they are doing what I am doing. I am just not putting on costume and makeup, but the process is no different.”
Though his roles as a regular actor are fewer, they are no less interesting to Serkis.
“The last live action role I played of note was probably Ian Dury, in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” he says. “And that was quite a physical role because he had polio and he was a rock musician. But whether it’s that kind of performance or Caesar or Gollum; they are all characters and they say something about the human condition.”
On the lighter side, how does his particular knack for physical dexterity and vocal range impact his daily life?
“Inevitably, someone will come up to me when I’m on a packed Tube, try and be secretive and say, ‘Can you do the Gollum voice for me?’ And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Here at 8.30 in the morning on the Victoria Line?’” He laughs.
“But I will tell you that Gollum has done quite a few phone messages for my friends and family.”
Dawn Of the Planet of the Apes opens today.
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