PLAY MOVIES GOLLUM SHADOWS SERKIS

THE world’s foremost motion capture performance genius, Andy Serkis has assumed many masks during his career.

His extraordinary skills in the field, in which actors don a special suit with sensors that track their body and face movements so a computergenerated character can be rendered over the top, have seen him assume the form of a giant gorilla ( King Kong), a drunken sea captain ( Captain Haddock in The Adventures of Tintin), a mysterious and evil overlord ( Supreme Leader Snoke in new Star Wars series) and a highly evolved chimpanzee ( Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy). But the one that just won’t go away is the one that kicked it all off.

More than 15 years after he first created the twisted, tortured, hobbit- gone- bad Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Serkis is still getting asked to do THAT voice.

Recently, the actor hilariously read out Trump tweets as Gollum on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and he’s lost count of the times he’s been asked to do voicemail messages over the years.

“That character is kind of like my picture of Dorian Gray in reverse,” Serkis says. “He’s never going to go away.” It probably doesn’t help that he can see himself when he looks at some of the trailblazing characters he has created on the big screen.

“Gollum is pretty reflective of my face — believe it or not — or certain of my features and Caesar’s are very much so,” he admits.

Serkis, who also runs The Imaginarium Studios, a hi- tech London facility that specialises in motion capture, has long said the technique is just another actor’s tool like make- up or prosthetics.