Next week when The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug hits UAE cinema screens, Andy Serkis is the actor you probably won’t recognise.
A Briton with major roles in The Lord of the Rings series, King Kong and The Rise of the Planet of Apes, Serkis has made a living playing characters shrouded in a mask of pixels.
But this doesn’t bother him a bit. For him, it’s all about the role and the story being told.
In Dubai for the inaugural Cinematic Innovation Summit, the 49-year-old said young filmmakers are about to enter one of the most exciting times in cinema.
“How will we experience film over the next decade? It’s a question with so many possibilities,” said a casually-dressed Serkis. “Will it be passive, interactive, virtual, real? The next generation of storytelling is limitless. How are our children going to receive stories when we’re gone. Will it be on screens? I predict probably not.”
Born and bred in Ruislip, West London, he set of for Lancaster University, a degree and career in visual arts the goal. It was here that theatre came calling – although, perhaps interestingly, not as an actor.
“I never wanted to be an actor,” he said. “I fell into acting as a complete accident.”
Intrigued and inspired by the storytelling ability of theatre, it was here Serkis found his feet.
It was only after performing in a production of Barrie Keefe’s play Gotcha, he decided that he wanted to become an actor.
“I studied the history of theatre and I developed a real passion for wanting to understand more about why we as a species want to tell stories. Why do we have this need to tell a tale?” he said with a smile. “We are part of a long journey of storytelling tradition.”
Serkis says even with the advances in digital cinema, the ability to tell a story through a good script should always remain at the heart of any production.
A classically-trained stage and screen actor, in 2011, Serkis founded The Imaginarium Studios with film producer Jonathan Cavendish, a creative digital studio based in Ealing, dedicated to the invention of believable, emotionally-engaging digital characters using Performance Capture technology, in which he specialises.
“Story-telling started with theatre. The theory of actors stepping outside of themselves and becoming someone or something else,” he said. “It was the performance capture of the time. Sixteeth-century Renaissance Italian theatre used masks and elaborate costumes. It was a way to retreat from naturalism, to blur the lines to allow the actor to fade and the character come to life.”
From 2001 to 2003, Serkis brought one of JRR Tolkien’s characters to life, making the much-misunderstood Gollum one of the most beloved screen characters of the early 21st century in Peter Jackson’s trilogy.
The role has almost turned Serkis into one of the most respected actors who rarely appears as himself on screen. Yet, according to the real man himself, every single motion and emotion he performs on set is translated to the character eventually seen on screen. He calls it the “delicate art of performance capture acting”.
“This call came through about a movie being filmed in New Zealand called Lord of the Rings,” he said.
Having asked his agent to find him a “more decent” role in the film, Serkis began talking to Jackson and things changed.
“I didn’t really want to play the voice for an animated character but Peter was very interested in a real actor driving the role and finally it would become an animated character. Rather than the other way around. That was something I was very interested in. “
Both Serkis and Gollum are back for Jackson’s return to the series with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the first of a three-part prequel to the Lord of the Rings series. Although Gollum only has one extended sequence with Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins, Jackson brought Serkis on-board as the film’s second unit director.
Serkis is also directing a performance-capture version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
“As an artistic medium, it’s another way of recording a performance, that’s all,” he says. “We’re minutes away from an iPhone app that captures a performance on a phone, where you can film yourself and be transformed into a real-time avatar. It’s going to happen.”
artslife@thenational.ae
