Andy Serkis Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

Colin McAuliffe is still part of me so I can't read I can't read include him in the conversation of you know it's my favorite Kody the golden will never go away he sort of and in my skin topsy turvy so this is a Mike Lee film called topsy-turvy about Gilbert and Sullivan who composer and writers of very popular operators they were the first sort of like pop popular musical forms actually so I was playing the character called John Doe ban who who was the Savoy choreographer he choreographed all of their operas now when you work with Mike Lee you work with him for you don't just get given a script and then you you play the character you work with him and develop the character over the course of we had 9 months of rehearsals for this part of what I had to do even though it finally never even turned up in the movie was I learnt to play the violin entirely from scratch to a proficient sort of degree because I it might it might have been used I learnt the choreography for for every one of their operas and there were about 15 to 20 of them and then you come to shoot the scenes and of course you're not given a script and it's so it's so that you do these long you know you're in character for hours and hours and hours of everyday and classic Mike Lee is that you you don't know how many days you're going to end up actually shooting and then you get you know you get called in and you start shooting a scene and you don't know how well that's going before so after 9 months of rehearsal I remember we I only actually shot that character for two days which is the most I've ever ever spent on developing a character for so little so little time in front of the camera it was a real extraordinary time I wouldn't have missed it for the world but you you think wow I got a shot three movies in the time of Graeme there you know the Lord of the Rings trilogy that mean Lord of the Rings was obviously a big turning point in my career because it not only was it the the creation of Gollum the character of Gollum but it was it was the it was the beginning of a long journey that is ongoing using motion capture technology which is now of course called performance captured technology Peter Jackson one of the things he wanted to set out to do was to he said to me look no you could never cast an actor to play Gollum you couldn't you just can't cast someone to we could that we could actually film we would never be able to find that person so we're gonna use this we're gonna manifest him on scene on screen as a CG character but we want an actor to be there present for firstly to act opposite the X playing Sam and Frodo so they're not having to imagine it because of course this was during a time where normally CG characters were put in afterwards and actors had to act against the tennis ball on a stick but because of the way that the relationship of Gollum to to the other two characters work he's he's often driving the scenes he's often you know tearing them apart he died the dynamics he's very interactive with them and so there was no way that that would work if they had to imagine what this other character was thinking when we started to work on the film it was it this this technology was sort of to one side because the first part of the process of playing God and was acting on set with with my fellow actors on location in fact the very very first day I have a shot on on Lord of the Rings was the last part of the third movie where Gollum is leading Sam and Frodo up into Mount Doom and that was you know because the principal photography for all three films took place together so we shot the all of the films together over the course of a year and a half so to come in and do I think it was like scenes 862 or something like that it was like right at the end of the show you know three films and I'm like wow okay this is where I'm starting I'd spent a lot of time researching how I was going to play goal and physically I'd studied I was very influenced by paintings by paintings by Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele er and various different artists I went through the whole of the trilogy looking at you know descriptions of how Gollum moves are based in all other sorts of animals and creatures you know I wanted to find something that was tangible for the power of the ring what it meant to him and so for me what spoke to me was this this notion of addiction and and if the ring were present in a normal person's life what would be the most powerful thing that would control them perhaps and again the way it would physically rack his body and tear a tear apart make him emaciated when Peter started to watch me doing what I was doing on set he said okay what we're gonna do is we're gonna film Andy and that's that we're gonna film him on set see how you know copy exactly what his movements are and then work for any sort of close-up CG shots which are just gonna Gollum which aren't fully interactive with the other actors or the environment we'll go back onto the motion capture stage and we'll capture will shoot plates and will Andy will act on his own in a motion capture studio and it was really exciting and really really thrilling and that was my first sort of epiphany of what performance capture could do and then that that technology evolved over the course of the three movies and we were then able in the last movie to actually take the performance capture cameras that were in that little volume and put put them actually onto the sets 13 going on 30 there's a really moving script it was a great cast Jennifer Garner Mark Ruffalo I mean just such terrific actors and an amazing director Garry Winx sadly no longer with us who had a really great take on it which is to make it although it's such a high concept piece you know girl-girl sort of becomes a 30 year old version of herself and it sort of had this really powerful believability it she gets to work at a magazine and he and I was playing the editor and there's a sequence in it where there's a party sequence where they they find out the two lovers finally get to kind of see each other across a cleric crowded dance floor and come together and I got to I got to do the the Thriller dance as this a kind of rather uptight editor thinks his party's going down the drain and it's all gonna be a shambles [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then suddenly that party comes to life in this dance and he relaxes and lets go and because you know he's quite flamboyant and yeah and I got to do the Thriller dance and moonwalk King Kong so King Kong was it was a huge journey of discovery in lots of different ways really when we started working on the movie and Peter asked me to play the role which was right at the end of Return of the King it was literally a moment way he said and I was thinking well this is the end of my journey with performance capture I'm going back to my job as a regular actor and that what an extraordinary experience but I didn't really expect it to go any further or all the technology to go any further I thought it was just really built for that so I went about researching gorillas in a great into great depth I went off to Rwanda and I studied mountain gorillas with the Dian Fossey gorilla fund International and learned about their vocalizations learnt about you know how you know how they behave how they are socially how they interact how they beat their chests how you know just just just everything about about how they were so all this research had done all this research when went back to Peter and said I really want to play King Kong you know unlike the 1933 version which is what inspired Pete to make the movie because he was such a huge fan of that movie I think we should make him more like a more gorilla like than but beast like for the first period of the shoot was the Wiz principal photography in the classic sense Naomi Watts was was being filmed all her angles are being shot and I was off camera for months being King Kong off camera for her and we used to I had a gorilla muscle suit I was placed up on ladders and podiums and scissor lifts and to get the right eye lines where no he could then act opposite me and then sometimes I'd be really really intimate and we'd be really close and she could reach up and and touch my face and that would be the equivalent of like touching Khan's nose but the intimacy was was created because we were able to really look into each other's eyes and I and properly act opposite each other at the end of principal photography I then did two months of doing all the capture for King Kong and and so what we used to do for that I was I was able to have Naomi's performances of the selects of her takes that Peter was going to use for me to act against and an hour to have have her in a little clamshell monitor that I could literally look down and then they were capturing my facial expressions as I was playing opposite this tiny little image of her so really and I was emotionally recalling the scenes when we played them together and so it was able to be you know connective in that way the other character I played was lumpy the cook who's this sort of kind of you know self-serving bit kind of doesn't want to endanger his life in any way he doesn't want to go and rescue and Erica's you know he's gonna be it's gonna all end in you know trouble Peter wants to recreate the scene this famous scene which was missing from the 1933 version called the spider pit sequence and which was never put into the movie because people people found it so in fact it was put into the movie but there were none taken out because people thought it was too scary and so people wanted it back in of course and because Pete's terrified of spiders he wanted to you know visit his fears by by creating this spider pit see because with these horrendous insects and creatures I mean it's it's it's really dark I remember when we shot it basically we had to have like three or four actors big stunt guys in in green suits who were holding my arms holding me back hold you know pulling pulling it back and then and then literally sort of like trying to envelop me and and sort of lumpy lumpy goes out trying to fight to the end when I saw it in the movie it was just like one of the most disgusting deaths I think I've ever seen on screen which traumatized my children forever actually the prestige to work with Chris Nolan was amazing I had always been a big fan of his work and this script I just I remember reading the script and just thinking wow this is an amazing story you know it's beautifully crafted the great wonderful David Bowie was in it and I had all you know pretty much all my scenes with him and so I felt so I mean I was so excited to work with with him and he was playing Nikola Tesla the great scientist these things never quite work as you expect them to mr. angio that's one of the principal beauties of science and David was so hilarious I mean he's such a comedian like and so unassuming and friendly and down-to-earth he's like it's hard to quite imagine the superstar that he is went when when he when you're in his presence because he's very very humble he really made me laugh a lot because he used to he was doing Serbian accent for Nikola Tesla and he used to say Andy I think my Serbian accent is a little bit like Inspector Clouseau he really put himself he really is to be was very self-deprecating in a very amusing way there's a sequence which is a lot to do with with these cats that are made to disappear and you don't know where they've gone and is it magic or you know it is it literally sort of transferring energy and and we so he had a lot of stuffed cats and he stir the yeast used two puppeteers I'm a play with them and sort of make him come live and he was just great fun and we did a struggle to keep straight face a lot of the time sex and drugs and rock and roll we wanted to tell a story about Ian that wasn't a sort of sort of and then and then and then biopic you know it was like a more of a snapshot of the energy of who he was and it told in a very sort of pop art way he was such a childhood hero of mine I mean he really when his when his hit song him you the rhythm stick came out I was fourteen years old and I hadn't heard anything like ever it was just it was it was everyone at school was singing it every you know it was just like it was a big hit and my first day of shooting on that was actually recording there was the band Lee used to play with which became very famous or we called the Blockheads and and they had huge hits like sex and drugs and rock and roll him unity rhythm state I mean countless countless numbers I had to record all of the songs for the show with the original Blockheads which was one of the greatest experiences ever and I went in there thinking if these guys don't like me I'll think I'm doing a really bad impersonation of the person who's died who was the leader of their band I'm gonna get absolutely killed here you know I started from the first song and I could just feel them well you know they look they launched into it and fortunately the first song didn't go too badly and then I feel relaxed and got into and they were like by the end of they were like wow god it's like having any the room [Applause] [Music] our insane physically I had to kind of learn to walk with a caliper and swing you know throw the weight from my hips I had to you know I built I built I did a lot of work on one side of my body so it's at the other side was sort of fairly inactive and I the worst thing was in D&D didn't have any hair on his body and I'm quite hirsute and I had my entire body waxed which was I think the most painful thing I've ever done in my life especially by the person they were had it done by who'd never done it before in her life and I just got these images of her putting hot wax on my body and then pulling and yanking and then getting stuck and literally having a feet up on the bed and punking you know it's just like I was raw at the oscillatory red raw at the end of this experience I thought I can never do that again the Planet of the Apes it's very rare that you get the opportunity as an actor to play to play a character all the way through from birth to death in effect and over the course of three movies and to see every aspect of that character's life in a way condensed and telescoped into into movie times and not only that it's not just a character kind of getting older it's a character that's evolving evolving physically evolving his intelligence is evolving because of the drug that he was being given I mean it's an amazing sort of a really incredible journey for a character so I think I think that's the one that that really that ultimately means the most to me I was the most difficult scene I think of all of the the city of all of the movies actually was probably the scene the final scene with with Woody Harrelson's character the colonel who who by now at the end of the movies has contracted the disease and he is becoming muties mutant mutating and he wants to kill himself and sit and Caesar now has his moment where he can exact revenge after this whole journey of trying to track down the killer of his family everything he believes him is is put into this one scene and there's a range of emotions that he goes through and I think that was the most challenging scene that I think I've got a shot actually to get to to get right The Adventures of Tintin we just explored sort of all different versions of filling that kind of bombastic nature of him and yet finding the finding moments where he can be sort of soulful and lost and sort of drifting away but but so Archibald haddock is his name we settled on this this Scottish accent because it just he just sort of worked really well against the fact that his ancestors were we wanted to make a character that felt like as far away possible possible as possible from from his ancestors that were more royal if you like so that there was a real you know the fortune had been lost and the family had got sort of pushed further and further he ended up you know they ended up migrating to Scotland and we built a backstory for our version of had it the entire film's motion capture in a studio there so there was no there was no there was nothing shot on-location it was all it was an entirely CG world Stephen was looking in avert through a virtual camera at all of the compositions where so what he's looking at as a lit rendered beautifully constructed shot with live characters moving around inside it and then what we see in the real world is is actors in grey suits head mounted cameras walking around a you know a sterile environment The Hobbit the difference between the Lord of the Rings process and and The Hobbit which was you know 10 years later was this whole journey of a motion-capture becoming performance capturing by that we mean capturing the face at the same time as the body and audio all at the same time so you only have to do it once there's no sort of going back and repeating the process so me acting opposite martin freeman that was not going back and having to do it a second time it was all on on the location or that on the amazing set that they'd built for the McCollum's cave alongside the technological advancements and they kind of at the resolution of the cameras and all of that stuff which makes the fidelity of the performance a lot stronger there's also an incredible amount of knowledge that was learnt by the animators who over the course of 10 years had worked on other films like King Kong on Avatar and Tintin but there's also rendering changes in the way that the skin textures are rendered and wetter who are the most brilliant visual effects team who created Gollum in the first film then in the Hobbit trilogy had really mastered a sort of you know how to make the skin really translucent how light reflects off the eyeballs so that you make them much more readable and much more lifelike and the whole way and I is constructed digitally to reflect the patina to see that the dilation of pupils and how light affects there it all this was all knowledge that had been built up since the first time we did it the last Jedi the character of Snoke was when I started working on it with JJ was a really elusive difficult challenging part to get my head around there wasn't really like a finished version of what he was going to be like so he it was gonna really come from what we were doing you know I mean in tandem with the designers but but it was it was like we've got a blank canvas here the more that we talked about it the more that we got under the skin of it the more you know we tried out but gosh you know so many different vocal qualities for him and and then it just settled down we got to simmer and this sort of this this character that was that had that carried a lot of physical wounds this properly manipulated can be a sharp there was a vulnerable look to him and a sort of emaciated look to him but that but then this this malice and control and you know this deep hatred that sort of came out of what we were exploring I suppose Avengers age of Ultron that role came to me in a very bizarre so a roundabout way I I at the Imaginarium which is the studio motion capture studio that we have in the UK which basically is a service providing studio as well as a sandbox to explore the future potential of what performance capture can do in all sorts of different arenas who worked on age of Ultron that was that was one of the first films we actually worked on where we were assisting Mark Ruffalo to become the Hulk and doing the capture on set Joss Whedon just turned around to me one day and and funny enough eats he really was a big fan of sex and drugs and rock and roll and he and he just said Andy I've just really I've got an idea and I don't know if you'd be up for it but there's a there's a small part in this film but you know it's a really great character as Ulysses core a really light idea of playing this mercenary this tough mercenary who's kind of answerable to no one so morally ambivalent and morally reprehensible so it's so excited yeah well I'll do it and it was only there was a it was a small part in our trumpet it was a really quite nice scene cuttlefish deep-sea fish they make lights disco nice way to hypnotize their prey and that then you know branched into into coming back into the black panther which was one of the most extraordinary experiences the black panthers getting to play a character in such a groundbreaking culturally important really exciting energy onset Raikou glee just knocking it out of the ballpark and and a great cast of actors who were all knowing that they were part of something really special yeah it was phenomenal and I like I loved where Ryan Coogler was pushing me just to be really sort of go as far as I could with the character everyone says that and it um I don't know what it was I think I was helped out by the costumer you know having a sort of a tight waistcoat and a and sure I did I do work out I keep fit but I wasn't I wasn't like you know you know on steroids or anything I'll kind of or pumping for my life I think a lot of its to do with the way that I was carrying myself I guess Mowgli legend of the jungle I read this script and I just thought this is a version of the story that that I just haven't seen before and it goes right to the heart of the book and the tone of the book and that book is a lot darker and it's a very complicated complex journey of an outsider of an outcast who's trying to form as he's realizing that he is you know not part of the family that he was born into other versions in a way they they sort of they get very caught up in you know rightly so as a piece of entertainment in that antics of the animals and you know in 1967 famous Disney Animation which we all grew up with and loved you know the animals are all singing all dancing you know one wonderful characters but they they seem to be at a distance from the source material so so that's why when I wanted to direct it I wanted to kind of do a version which really delved into the Kipling world and and and set it in India and also our version of the film really a third of it the last act takes place in the world of mankind and other versions tended to avoid that you Bagheera will hunt you and if he catches you you fire wanted him to be this this brusque kind of yeah yes drill sergeant he was pushing really pushing Mowgli hard for his own good and it was it really represents a sort of tough love rather than a sort of all-singing all-dancing hippie-ish kind of hit home honey eating bear animal farm we're making it with Netflix and we have a wonderful cast lined up to do it we are in the middle of writing at the moment and refining the script and that will be shooting it around about probably hopefully over this time next year

Channel: GQ

Views: 1,621,360

Keywords: andy serkis, andy serkis acting, iconic characters, iconic roles, andy serkis gq, andy serkis 2018, andy serkis interview, andy serkis gollum, andy serkis voice, andy serkis voices, andy serkis actor, andy serkis lord of the rings, andy serkis character, gq, gq magazine

Id: 1qMmPSSN2-Y

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/bearlegion]

And to think he’s now the Man United manager!

[u/AndySerkisMocapSuit]

What a career we've had

[u/[deleted]]

Love Andy, so well spoken and humble.

[u/Pasan90]

Sounds like they just made up Snoke as they went along lol.

Anyway huge respect for this man. He really has done some amazing work.

[u/d-r-i-f-t-i-n]

I hope Theresa May is in this.

[u/srslybr0]

i love his klaue, it was the best part of the film.

[u/[deleted]]

This isn't about Monkey in the Alex Garland penned video game Enslaved.