Is this man the future of storytelling?
Andy Serkis has won rave reviews as Caesar the ape. But he isn’t monkeying around, finds John Hiscock
His face may not appear on many film posters, but the characters he has portrayed are some of the best known in recent cinema history. Andy Serkis, a diminutive actor from Ruislip, Middlesex, is the man who created, among others, Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy; King Kong in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the classic monster film; and Caesar, the dignified leader of the apes in the billion-dollar reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise, which started in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes and continues this week with an even more effects-laden sequel.
Serkis has done it by pioneering the use of performance capture technology in which an actor wears a skin-tight suit with markers allowing his movements and expressions to be electronically tracked. This is then translated into computer-generated imagery to bring the character to life.
It has helped him rise from being a dependable though reasonably obscure British actor to one with a specific talent that has earned him industry-wide recognition and a dedicated fan following.
But that’s not enough for Serkis. The 53-year-old plans to use the technique to revolutionise the entertainment industry and save cinema itself.
“We’re working on virtual reality and augmented reality, so there are lots and lots of different areas where performance capture is now becoming a common tool for storytelling for the next generation,” he says. “There is a decline in cinema-going, except for tentpole movies, so there’s a need to find new ways that are part theatre and part film. Performance capture sits in the middle of this new technology.”
Serkis bubbles with enthusiasm as he expounds on his vision for the future of entertainment. “I reckon in about 10 or 15 years time we won’t be watching things on big flat screens but we’ll be watching events that we will be part of, with augmented reality glasses, where part of it is real, part of it is performance capture, part of it is cinematic and part of it is like a theatre piece.”
He and his production company, Imaginarium Studios, worked for a year on making Ariel, the sprite come to life in a tech-infused performance of the RSC’S The Tempest for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday. The technology was integrated into the performance in a way that enhanced the live theatre and didn’t overwhelm it.
“Using performance capture, we made Ariel shape-shift and change into all these apparitions,” he explains.
We are talking at a bar in the basement of a London hotel following a screening of War for the Planet of the Apes, the third – and critics say the best – of the series so far. The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin called Serkis’s motioncapture performance “the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen”.
The film is also one of the most expensive things you’ve ever seen and the most costly film to have been made in the Planet of the Apes saga which famously began in 1968 with Charlton Heston (who uttered the immortal line: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape”).
That film spawned four sequels. In 2001, Tim Burton released a widelypanned remake, starring his then wife Helena Bonham Carter in an ape suit.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in 2011, rebooted the franchise with Andy Serkis, performance capture and truly groundbreaking digital effects. It depicted a simian uprising on Earth led by a biochemically enhanced chimpanzee named Caesar. It grossed nearly £300 million.
The sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was set
10 years later, and the aptly titled War for the
Planet of the Apes is set another five years after that. The action sees renegade soldiers led by the imperious Colonel (Woody Harrelson) launching an all-out attack on the apes; Caesar, the saga’s hero, is charged with leading them to a new home.
“Caesar’s journey is a hugely emotional one,” says Serkis. “Filming was very dark and intense and, also, it happened when both the director Matt Reeves and I suffered personal loss in the middle of the movie so there’s a brutality to the shoot and a great sense of darkness and foreboding.” Around the 2014 release of Dawn of the Planet of Apes, Serkis’s performance was so strong it caused many in Hollywood to wonder if motion-capture actors should be eligible for Oscars. In turn, some visual effects artists began to complain that actors received too much credit for what was, they argued, largely the work of highly skilled animators.
Randall William Cook, the animation supervisor on Lord of the Rings, put it very bluntly: “Fact is, Andy’s physical participation in the first film was nonexistent,” he wrote on the industry website Cartoon Brew.
For his part, Serkis says animators on the Planet of the Apes films have become “more and more attuned to how to honour the original actors’ performances”, and there is now a “huge, huge difference in the integrity and fidelity of the performances” that audiences see on screen.
Serkis takes his motion-capture work very seriously, but the acting he did before is not to be sniffed at.
The son of an Iraqi father and English mother, he began his career as a stage actor in touring companies, playing the MC in Cabaret at the Royal Court Theatre, The Fool in King Lear and parts in The Threepenny Opera and Steven Berkoff ’s Decadence. He appeared in several television films and mini-series, and his cinematic work included roles in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-turvy and Among Giants.
Even after his motion-capture success in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, he continued to portray several real people, including Moors murderer Ian Brady in Longford, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination; William Hare in Burke and Hare; Manchester record producer Martin Hannett in 24 Hour Party People; Albert Einstein in the BBC drama Einstein and Eddington and the polio-afflicted rock singer Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.
Serkis has also directed a film called Breathe, set in the 1950s and starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy. A biopic of polio sufferer, disabled rights pioneer and inventor Robin Cavendish, Breathe has been selected to open the London Film Festival. Serkis, whose business partner is Cavendish’s son Jonathan, describes it as “a beautiful love story about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.”
Next he’ll direct Benedict Cumberbatch and Cate Blanchett in The Jungle Book: Origins, a 2018 Rudyard Kipling adaptation that promises to be much more “savage” than Disney’s. As if that weren’t enough, for the past five years he’s been working on a new version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm; although that is now on the back burner thanks to his role in the new Star Wars films (in which he plays Supreme Leader Snoke).
Serkis also plays a villain in Marvel’s forthcoming superhero film Black Panther. Then there is also the possibility of another Planet of the Apes adventure.
“The story could continue,” he says. “I would love to carry on but equally if this was to be the end, I’ve got incredibly happy memories.”
War For the Planet of the Apes is on
release now