LIVING A CHILDHOOD DREAM
Lethbridge actor Chad Rook joins the front lines in War for the Planet of the Apes
For a few days back in 2015, actor Chad Rook attended what he calls “ape school.”
It was part of the training/audition process for War for the Planet of the Apes held in the appropriately named Mammoth Studios in Burnaby, B.C., a vast complex where the Lethbridge actor joined “movement choreographer” Kerry Notary and a cameraman in an otherwise big empty room.
Rook was hoping to nab the role of Winter, a hulking albino gorilla and part of the ape forces led by Caesar (played, through motioncapture technology, by Andy Serkis) against the humans.
“Basically, I would just follow Kerry and he would walk around like an ape,” says Rook. “The cameraman would follow us. That was it. It was just this massive room and a very one-on-one experience where they made sure there were no distractions.”
He auditioned four times, each time bounding about like an ape and showing off a made-up form of sign language in front of director Matt Reeves and a bunch of producers.
He didn’t get the role.
“I must have sucked at it,” he says with a laugh. “Because right after that is when they asked me to read for Boyle, the human role.”
Three auditions later, he landed the role of an aggressive military man on the front lines of the War for the Planet of the Apes. He is one of the right-hand men of the Colonel, the ruthless head of the human army played by Woody Harrelson.
So while there was no further need for ape school, Rook did have to sheer his lengthy locks and undergo a different sort of training.
“Myself and Gabriel Chavarria, who plays Preacher in the film, we both had our own individual military training before we started filming,” Rook says. “They taught us everything from walking to how to hold guns and how to shoot them and all that kind of stuff. That stuff is always fun, but basically when you are on set and surrounded by 500 background military soldiers and they are all hooting and hollering and marching and stuff, the adrenalin is insane. You are legitimately living a childhood dream: you are a G.I. Joe.”
Perhaps, but ever since Hollywood rebooted the Planet of the Apes franchise, the humans have not always been the heroes of the conflict. As this is Rook’s first entry into the Hollywood blockbuster, he is understandably cautious about revealing too much about the new film before it opens on Friday. But, he can safely acknowledge that Boyle showcases some non-heroic characteristics.
“I am one of the soldiers who gets thing done and, unfortunately for the apes, I get things done in a very aggressive manner and I do whatever I can by whatever means necessary in favour of the humans,” he says. “It’s very hard to say with these storylines if there’s even a villain in it. If you look at the concept of the storyline overall, the humans may look like the villains in certain aspects, but the
apes might be villains as well because they are both just fighting to survive. But, needless to say, there are certain characters like mine who definitely take the more villainous approach in how they are handling things.”
Villains are hardly new to Rook. In fact, he has carved out a bit of a niche playing the baddie. While his pre-thespian work included spending time as an international model, the actor’s good looks have not prevented him from playing TV vampires, demons, kidnap- pers, killers and even a supervillain named the Weather Wizard in the CW series The Flash.
Most recently he has starred in Timeless, playing the nasty henchman of main antagonist Garcia Flynn (Goran Visnjic) in the NBC sci-fi series.
But while Rook has stayed busy since he left Picture Butte High School more than a decade ago to pursue acting and modelling in Vancouver, War for the Planet of the Apes is by far the most highprofile project he has been involved in.
He is not the only Alberta connection to the film. While he shot all of his scenes in B.C., a unit shoot was held in Kananaskis in January 2016 that employed a local crew who covered props, visual effects and landscaping. Edmonton-raised actress Sara Canning also stars in the film.
What Rook soon discovered was that, despite the massive budget and state-of-the-art technology, a film such as War for the Planet of the Apes actually requires a good deal of imagination from its actors.
“I’ve never done motion-capture before, and it was a completely different experience,” he says. “You actually end up filming each scene three times. The humans and the apes do a scene together and that’s never used, it’s a reference for special effects and stuff. Then you have the humans doing a scene with no apes in it. So you’re basically doing your scene completely on your own and you use the scene you did previously as a reference and have to remember what they did. Then they film a third scene in a green-screen studio with the apes and then they put the two together. Anytime you see the humans and apes interacting in the film, they are actually not together at all.”
By the time filming began, Rook said he was actually OK with flunking ape school.
“Watching the (apes) on set and seeing how physically challenging it was, there was a part of me, I’m not going to lie, that was pretty happy I was to be playing a human role and not an ape role,” Rook says.