My livelihood depends on the art of animators.
When you do animation – well, straightforward animation, although it’s not straightforward – the voice for a character or something, they’re always singular experiences, really.
What’s fantastic is that there’s a real growing appreciation for performance-capture technology as a tool for acting.
Gollum is entirely based on the notion of addiction. The way that the ring pervades him, makes him craving, lustful, depletes him physically, psychologically and mentally.
‘Macbeth’ is an amazing story.
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.
I grew up with ‘Star Wars’ and was a massive fan of the original films.
Our family were outsiders, and I’ve always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.
People used to say, ‘Andy Serkis lent his movements to Gollum,’ and now they say, ‘Andy Serkis played Caesar.’ That’s a significant leap.
I’ve been on stage and been an actor for many years and used different mediums.
Originally, I thought, ‘Gollum’s such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible – he’s so full of pathos and real emotion.’
I understand why people went nuts for ‘The Artist.’ We use words so much, it’s nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone – or something – is thinking or feeling.
What’s wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They’re so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.
Certain gorillas are more evolved than certain human beings I know.
A lot of actors on film sets… very often they’re not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I’ve always had that awareness and that’s something that I’ve wanted to bring in to go beyond acting… As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked.
I’m quite contrary. If people agree on something, I tend to gravitate the other way by my nature. I don’t like to be told what to do. I think it goes back to school. I like to do things I want to do and I really don’t like doing what I don’t want to do.
‘The Hobbit’ was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the ‘riddles in the dark’ passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.
My very, very first moment on set on ‘Lord of the Rings’ in 2000 was me in a lycra suit, six and a half thousand feet up on a mountain in New Zealand, standing in front of 250 crew who were all wondering what I was doing – myself included.
I can get on with all different sorts of people, and I never feel homesick, particularly, or I’ve never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country.
I’d like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.
There’s a huge gulf between people who can afford to go to drama school and those who can’t.
I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, ‘God, they don’t paint behind the sets.’ It’s a bit of a shame, really – ‘Oh, what’s on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.’ I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid.
I had a cat called Dizz, after Dizzy Gillespie.
I do love nature, but I don’t suppose I’d spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!
I do have anger management issues. Not clinical. Probably no more than most people.
I’m a shockingly bad sleeper. In bed very late. Awake at the crack of dawn.
My first job when I got my equity card was acting in 14 plays back-to-back. Playing that many roles, you look for ways of differentiating the characters physically, which goes hand in hand with understanding them psychologically.
People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that’s me who is acting up there – even if it is behind a mass of pixels – and it’s my voice you hear.
Playing a character in a video game is different to other performances because your character can’t lead the audience of players in one direction.
Put it this way: If I had to go back to 1968 and wear the makeup that John Chambers made for the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ series, I think I would rather wear a unitard.
Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance.
I want to link together ancient forms of storytelling and the future.
If you are not moved by the character, no amount of CGI will give you a performance that is emotionally engaging or devastating – what a live-action performance does.
Performance capture, for me, is finding the essence of a performance.
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