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
Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.
Gollum was so interesting to me because he's morally ambivalent, and I love the notion of a quest that is to lose something. Not to gain, but to get rid of something.
David Bowie is playing Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current and I am playing Igor to his Frankenstein.
The whole chameleon thing about acting. That's why I'm moving towards directing - it's a much more healthy occupation.
I've been told that some guy wrote something like, 'Andy Serkis does everything, animators do nothing.' Of course I never in a million years said that, wouldn't ever say that. It's not within my understanding of filmmaking to ever say anything like that.
Of course the computer animators take a lot of the credit for what's going on, but with Peter's help I really fleshed out the character,
I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.
In performance capture roles, it's not a committee of animators that author the role, it's the actor. I think that's a significant thing for people to understand.
I would love to direct an 'Apes' movie. It would be in the spirit of where I'm going with my career - avatars played by actors to say something about the human condition.
If you're in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared - it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data.
Performance capture, for me, is finding the essence of a performance.
Great actors like Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page and Samuel L. Jackson will go and do a videogame, because they understand that storytelling isn't just necessarily about filmmaking.
If James Franco's wearing a costume, and I'm wearing a motion capture suit, we don't act any differently with each other because of what we're wearing. We're embodying our roles.
The thing is, I don't just take roles because they're performance capture.