FEATURE
“IT’S W BEEN A STRANGE, BANANA CURVE OF A CAREER” Jenny Priestley sits down with actor/ director Andy Serkis to discuss how technology helped change the course of his career, and tries very hard not to ask him to say “Precious”
hen Andy Serkis first boarded his flight to Wellington, New Zealand back in late 1999, little did he know that the role he was to portray in Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings trilogy would change his life. Playing the oft-maligned Gollum not only brought Serkis as an actor to a whole new audience, but Jackson’s decision to film his performance using motion-capture opened up a new creative world, not just as an actor but also as a director. Fast forward 20 years, and Serkis is now recognised as an industry leader when it comes to using technology to enhance an actor’s performance. So much so, that he was presented with IBC’s highest award, the International Honour for Excellence, in Amsterdam last month. The actor/director admits to being “blown away” when he first learned of the accolade. “I really feel very honoured to be given this award because it’s been a strange, weird banana curve of a career,” he laughs. “I’ve encountered so many extraordinary and talented people across the board, from animators to concept designers to CG artists to software designers. I never anticipated that my career would take me on this journey. And so looking back, I feel I am standing to a certain degree on the shoulders of lots of other people.” Going back to Serkis’ introduction to how technology could help enhance an actor’s performance, he is quick to pay tribute to director Peter Jackson: “Without doubt it was Peter who set me on this course,” he says. “The visual effects we used on Lord of the Rings helped me become that character, and then what kind of ensued after that. I literally thought I’d be going back to my life as a conventional actor, whatever that means. I had no idea that it would mean that this whole other track would open up.” Since first pulling on that motion capture suit, Serkis has gone on to wear it a number of times for Peter Jackson (King Kong, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, The Hobbit trilogy), and in all three of the rebooted Planet of the Apes trilogy. He’s also branched out into directing, first with indie drama Breathe and most recently with the visual-effects heavy Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. He’s also gone on to establish The Imaginarium Studios, the UK’s leading performance capture studio based at Ealing Studios. “Setting up Imaginarium Studios, which is a laboratory that was always going to be creatively led, the idea was to bring in writers, directors, actors to be in a space where you can actually see characters come to life and iterate those characters,” Serkis explains.
“I’m so inured to any difficulties of working with performance capture technology, that I don’t actually see it.” ANDY SERKIS 12 | TVBEUROPE OCTOBER 2019