Gollum actor takes unexpected journey
Andy Serkis amazed to still be doing role 12 years later
Andy Serkis sits in a plush but overheated hotel room in West London. He’s full of energy, his unruly curls tied back from an expressive face that right now seems alert, interested and wide-awake. But when he’s tired, he tells me, he tends to fall asleep.
Immediately. Wherever he happens to be.
A couple of days before we met, he’d dozed off on the subway, and was woken by a woman nudging him insistently. “Are you the guy who does all the monsters?” she asked, as he opened his eyes. “You play that whats is name from Lord of the Rings, don’t you?”
“It’s Gollum,” Serkis told her sleepily about his role in the Rings movie trilogy as well as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which opens around the world Friday. Then he looked up to realize that the train was full, and that his slumbering form had become the centre of attention.
“The woman was going, ‘That’s it! You’re Gollum!’ and the whole carriage was staring at me. That was a weird way to wake up.” He laughs, and says he’s often recognized now, although usually when he’s more awake. “It’s not overwhelming, not major A-list Hollywood mobbing, but it’s every day, at some point.”
This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. As well as the hugely successful Lord of the Rings, during the past decade Serkis has starred in a string of big-budget blockbusters: King Kong, Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin and the more recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But although his performances are central to those films, his face doesn’t appear in them at all. Only his facial expressions.
He does play straight roles — his extraordinary performance as singer Ian Dury in the 2010 biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, for example — but Serkis is best known for his work in the fast-growing acting specialty of performance capture. Whether he’s playing Gollum, Kong, Tintin’s sidekick Captain Haddock or Caesar, the super-intelligent young chimpanzee who ends up leading a revolution in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, what you see on screen are his movements, his expressions, his voice — but all overlaid with a digital skin that makes him appear as a realistic-looking monster, ape or animated character without costume or makeup.
Serkis didn’t set out to be an actor. At university he began a visual arts degree but switched to drama when he discovered his passion for it. Gollum was his first venture into the field that has made him famous, yet when he got the call asking him to go to New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings in 1999, Serkis was a bit miffed it wasn’t for a better role. As the hobbit horribly corrupted by the magic ring at the centre of J.R.R. Tolkein’s epic, he thought he’d probably end up being heard, but not actually seen.
But still, he is not a man to do any job by halves. Once he was on set — his body distorted into the creature’s shape and whispering “My precccioussss!” in a voice inspired by the sound of his cat coughing up hairballs — it became clear to director Peter Jackson that they could push the whole thing much farther.
So Serkis ended up working with Weta Digital, the special effects company set up by Jackson in 1993 with a small group of other young New Zealand filmmakers. As a result, his Rings experience was rather different to that of the other actors.
“The cast was quite tight, and I always felt slightly adrift from the rest. The motion capture team was building up at that point, and they became the people I worked with and hung out with. And they are the people I’m still working with … 12 years later!”
He’s 48 now, and has celebrated seven birthdays while working in New Zealand. “We did Lord of the Rings and King Kong, and then I directed a video game there. Both Tintin and Rise of the Planet of the Apes were Weta-driven jobs, so I did reshoots of those in New Zealand, and then we’ve just done The Hobbit. I love it down there. You can focus on work very easily, because your mind is uncluttered with other stuff. It feels so far away from everything else — it’s quite a pure existence.”
When he first played Gollum, he didn’t dream he’d still be talking about the role 12 years later. Yet our meeting in London is to do just that. He reprises the role in An Unexpected Journey, the first of Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, Tolkein’s prequel to Lord of the Rings.
“… Everything was moving the same, everything was sounding the same — but I wasn’t feeling it.” Physically, too, he felt the difference 12 years can make. “There were leaps from rock to rock that I made last time with ease that didn’t quite happen this time,” he says dryly. “I grazed my shins a few times.” The very first scene Jackson chose to shoot was one in which the hobbit Bilbo Baggins — played by Martin Freeman — gets lost in a cave and has to fight for his life by solving the riddles Gollum sets for him.
“We shot the whole scene like a theatre piece, doing it again and again for two weeks. It was great for Martin to be able to explore Bilbo, and he was great. Every single take is fresh with him, and we were bouncing off each other.” Serkis works wearing a Lycra bodysuit covered in markers to aid the computer animation later, and a cumbersome head camera to capture the nuances of his facial expressions. It’s only at the end of the process, when the film has been edited to the director’s satisfaction, that the special effects team adds the digital skin. In the Rings films, Serkis acted alongside the rest of the cast, but then had to recreate his performances alone afterward, for the special effects cameras. Now the technology has evolved to enable his final performance to be shot at the same time as the other actors.
“Every single organic thing that happens between Martin and I as Bilbo and Gollum — live action cameras are filming him, performance capture cameras are filming me. So the director’s got the performance that he wants in the moment, there and then. All the invention that happens, all the acting choices, all those things are caught — the performance happens on set.” This is something even the technicians still sometimes struggle to grasp.