Actor, a master of performance
If you lined up the most successful actors currently at work in Hollywood, you could easily name each celebrated face one after another – Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey jnr and Dwayne Johnson – until you got to the final figure, a 53-year-old Englishman with a mischievous grin and a mountaineer’s muscled arms.
This is Andy Serkis, and he has more hit franchises to his name than any of his famous contemporaries.
Serkis has starred in the Lord of the Rings blockbusters, the aboutto-conclude Planet of the Apes trilogy, and is now part of the unfolding Star Wars galaxy.
To be more exact, he played the shrivelled, insane creature Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, the ape leader Caesar in Planet of the Apes, and the scarred, elongated Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars.
Serkis is the maestro of motioncapture, the digital technique that takes an actor’s performance and renders a completely new appearance on top of their performance while maintaining every physical gesture and detail.
It is, Serkis points out, the end of typecasting, and he realised as much when at the end of five years making the Lord of the Rings trilogy filmmaker Peter Jackson asked Serkis to play the title role in 2005’s King Kong.
Gollum was just over a metre tall, Kong eight metres, but Serkis embodied both.
‘‘Performance capture is one of the greatest actors’ tools of the 21st century because it allows us the ability to transform into another character with limitless possibilities,’’ says Serkis, speaking from his north London home.
‘‘As an actor you can play anything, and that’s why the last 17 years have gone in this amazing direction for me.’’
If Gollum, executed by New Zealand’s ground-breaking Weta Workshop, was the beginning of the movement towards motioncapture acting, the Planet of the Apes movies has been its culmination.
Serkis has played Caesar, whose scientifically-enhanced intelligence makes him a simian revolutionary, as a young chimpanzee in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a brave warrior in 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and now a conflicted, ageing commander in War for the Planet of the Apes.
To play the apes, Serkis and his co-stars have repeatedly gone through what they call ‘‘ape camp’’, an extended preparation where they spend long hours sitting on their haunches.
Serkis can climb, eat and run as an ape would, but he can also deliver lines and convey deeply held emotion.
‘‘It’s incredibly freeing. What you don’t get is any stimulation from the character or their costume, because you don’t have those things,’’ he says.
‘‘You have to bring the character to life internally, but you totally forget what you’re working with after about five minutes, even if we were shooting War during a Canadian winter.’’
The standard outfit for a motion-capture performance is a Lycra bodysuit, which along with his face is studded with markers to create a three-dimensional record of every movement through a tiny helmet-mounted tracking device that sits in front of Serkis’ face.
In production stills, at first glance he looks like a cyclist who’s had parts of his bike grafted onto his body, but in War for the Planet of the Apes, Serkis and director Matt Reeves capture every nuance of Caesar’s journey.
‘‘That was always Matt Reeves’ intention – he’s a brilliant storyteller and a great actor’s director. When he stepped into this world to make Dawn, it was because he wanted to see the world through apes’ eyes,’’ Serkis says.
‘‘What he loved about the original film was the fact that it was so associated with Caesar.
‘‘The film is called War for the Planet of the Apes, but it’s also a war for Caesar’s soul.’’
The success of War, which has already topped the American box office upon week of release, has also reignited calls for Serkis’ performance to be recognised during Hollywood’s awards seasons.
Industry guilds, which set the parameters for the likes of the Academy Awards, have previously failed to include motion-capture work alongside traditional acting performances, with Serkis patiently setting out why they should.
‘‘The visual effects work is there for everyone to see and they’re phenomenal, but those characters would not have the life they have if they weren’t authored by a live-action performance by an actor with those in the moment decisions an actor makes,’’ he says.
It has taken time, but his colleagues are starting to agree with him.
Serkis doesn’t dwell on the annoyance that comes with people assuming his Caesar or his Gollum or his Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (yes, that’s Serkis too) is a digital creation he simply dubs over during post-production.
Instead, he’s busy with The Imaginarium Studio, a company he co-founded in 2011 to pursue motion-capture performances and beyond.
The husband and father of three, who still regularly gives live action performances in films has also branched out into directing.
‘‘My life has been radically altered on a number of occasions not by what I set out to do, but what lay next to it – I call it the adjacent possible,’’ Serkis says happily. War for the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas now.