Andy Serkis
Andy Serkis
Andrew Clement "Andy" Serkisis an English film actor, director and author. He is best known for his performance capture roles comprising motion capture acting, animation and voice work for such computer-generated characters as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogyand The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the eponymous King Kong in the 2005 film, Caesar in Riseand Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Captain Haddock / Sir Francis Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintinand Supreme Leader...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth20 April 1964
CityLondon, England
Andy Serkis quotes about
The great thing about performance capture is you can go off, and then, without changing costume, you can become another character.
I think the actors in 'Greystoke' were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who's, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.
Every single frame has got something going on in the background; in many ways, it's an embarrassment of riches. I guess some of the New York scenes, especially in the third act when Kong is back. Some of that rampage stuff, with the people running down the street and all the shop signs and all the neon that just goes on for miles. Those big aerial shots in New York that completely faithfully re-create New York at the time. That's pretty special stuff.
I think he (director, Peter Jackson) was originally going to have Kong kill Lumpy. Instead he gave me a role who finally gets devoured by computer graphics ? I don't know whether that is a comment or not.
This was absolutely, really needed because we were doing really badly this year.
When I first came out to New Zealand for principal photography, the focus was on voicing Gollum. But Peter wanted Gollum to be the most interactive digital character ever made for a movie, with a combination of live action and digital animation.
What's fantastic is that there's a real growing appreciation for performance-capture technology as a tool for acting.
When you have children, you realize that at the end, it's all about passing on, about handing down.
I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children!
An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.
You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.
Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.
I had a body wax. It's the most painful thing I have ever done in my life. I had every single hair on my body pulled out, and I really bruised.
There's a huge gulf between people who can afford to go to drama school and those who can't.