Andy Serkis comes out from behind Gollum and King Kong
The Sunday Times
December 14, 2008
Andy Serkis comes out from behind Gollum and King Kong
He has portrayed some of the most extraordinary characters on screen,
from King Kong to Gollum. Now Andy Serkis is emerging from behind the
disguises and gaining recognition as a fine actor
Scott Athorne
Andy Serkis has made a living out of playing nutters, freaks and
psychopaths.
So it is more than a little worrying when he tells me that `It’s really
hard to come out of character.’ He is the Boris Karloff of the 21st
century, the actor the top casting directors call for when they want a
monster to scare the audience witless. He played the titular 25ft-tall
gorilla in the 2005 remake of King Kong, and the loathsome Gollum in
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the television play
Longford, last year, he became the Moors murderer Ian Brady. And we
have just seen him in BBC1’s Little Dorrit as the murderous Rigaud, a
character he himself has called `a thoroughly nasty piece of work’.
Even when Serkis played Einstein ‘ in the BBC film Einstein and
Eddington ‘ he brought out the darkness in the Nobel laureate. `It was
a dream role,’ he says, eyes blazing, hands clasped. `Apart from the
great things we know about him, Einstein could be pretty ruthless,
manipulative and dark. Ninety per cent of his time and energy was
focused on work, and this was one of the biggest regrets of his life He
just felt really guilty for screwing up his children, who were part of
the sacrifice.’
Serkis’s reputation as someone who can play iconic, larger-than-life
characters has paid off big-time in Hollywood, where the studios like
to place their stars in neatly labelled boxes. When Steven Spielberg
announced this year that he would be adapting the comic-strip Tintin
for the big screen, it was almost inevitable that Serkis would scoop
the part of Captain Haddock. Tintin will be a trilogy. Spielberg will
direct the first instalment, which starts shooting in March; Peter
`Lord of the Rings’ Jackson will direct the second, and they plan to
co-direct the third. Serkis is not allowed to reveal details, only that
the same motion-capture technology that was used to create Gollum will
be used to bring the Belgian cartoons to life. `It’s extremely
exciting.They will be animated 3-D humanoids, essentially,’ Serkis
says. He is also excited about playing the 1970s rock star Ian Dury in
a biopic that starts shooting next summer.
He’s on a roll, and it’s well deserved. You will struggle to find a bad
review. His portrayal of Gollum was tipped for an Oscar in 2003, until
the Academy disqualified the performance because of the digital
manipulation involved in motion capture, where an actor’s movements are
digitally recorded, then applied to 3-D models. `Andy’s one of our
greats,’ says Philip Martin, who directed Einstein and Eddington. `He’s
incredibly intuitive. He can blend edgy and raw drama with the
technical craft of acting, which is a rare thing. He can play charming,
complicated, difficult, mercurial, dangerous and emotional characters.
Or he can play all of them at the same time.’
Strangely, what Serkis cannot be is a naturally confident interviewee.
When we first met at a screening of King Kong three years ago, he was
uncomfortable, smiling stiffly as a publicist pushed him around a room
crammed with champagne-swigging journalists eager to meet the
gorilla-man. And that same look of mild bewilderment crossed his face
in Budapest, where we met while he was filming Einstein and Eddington.
His nervous disposition is accentuated by his roving blue eyes and his
perpetually furrowed brow.
The extremes of the human condition are what Serkis plays best. It
started in 1992 with his breakthrough theatre role in April De
Angelis’s Hush, when he played a schizophrenic tramp who kills his pet
dog and then takes on its spirit. He spent most of the play naked and
barking.
`I found that a hard role to shake off. It really messed with my head,’
he says. Why is he attracted to disturbed people? `I suppose I find
those characters interesting, because they’re layered, they’re complex,
they’re challenging.’
There may also be some personal truth in these brutal roles. As a child
he used to have `huge rages’ that required all three of his older
sisters to sit on top of him to hold him down. `We used to fight like
hell,’ he recalls. `I was often jealous that they had more freedom than
me.’ When was the last time he lost his temper? `Last week,’ he admits.
It happened when a Land Rover cut across his Toyota people-carrier at a
roundabout near his home in north London. `He started giving me
verbals, and it was genuinely not my fault. I had to step out of the
car at the lights to tell him what I thought, and then it started
getting heated. Then people started beeping their horns because the
lights turned green. I was desperately trying not to get aerated, and
as I was walking back to my car he went, `And anyway, you shouldn’t be
driving: you should be in a limo with the money you’re earning.’ And I
sat back in my car thinking, `God, I can’t even lose my temper any
more.”
Now 44, he was brought up in Ruislip, west London, the eldest of five
children. His father was an Iraqi-born gynaecologist of Armenian
descent; his English mother worked part-time with special-needs
c
hildren. `I’ve always felt transient,’ he says. `I don’t feel like I’m
from a particular culture.’ His parents now live together in England,
but back then his father spent a lot of time in Baghdad, where he
founded and ran a hospital ‘ work that got him imprisoned by Saddam
Hussein’s Ba’ath party for a month, without charges. `It was a scary
time. Friends had been taken and killed. He’s from a different
generation, and has experienced things I’ve never had to, and I value
that. He was also quite absent in those days, though we used to visit
him in Baghdad every summer.’ Who is he more like, his mother or
father? `My mother is very adventurous; she’s got an irrepressible
creative thirst, which I also have. And there are elements of my father
in me too, like doggedness. I’m like a dog with a bone if I really
believe in something.’
Serkis’s parents are Catholic, but he rejected religion at an early
age. `At a certain point in your life it becomes obvious that to adhere
to one strict set of rules cripples examination of everything else,
because there are shutters that come down,’ he says. `Religion,
especially fundamentalist religion, stops you from engaging and seeing
other points of view.’ Absolutism is a dirty word: `Acting is about
shades of grey. If I hear someone say they’re 100% certain about
something, then it’s almost inevitable that I’ll take the opposite
view. I guess I feel at odds with many things in society, and
absolutism is always a trigger for me.’
Serkis caught the acting bug when he starred in Barrie Keeffe’s Gotcha
in his final year at Lancaster University. He was originally meant to
be the set designer ‘ he was studying visual arts ‘ but the drama
tutors recognised his raw talent and encouraged him to audition for the
lead role instead. After graduating, he performed in 14 plays at the
Dukes playhouse in Lancaster. Since then he has trodden the boards of
nearly every important theatre in England ‘ most notably the Royal
Exchange in Manchester and the Royal Court in London. Being on stage is
like an empathy rush, he grins. `It’s a beautiful thing that happens
when you totally inhabit a role, like surfing a great artistic wave,
and you know that it’s having a chemical reaction on the people
watching.’ Does he want to say something that has value? `I guess so.
Before I had children I was slightly more holy about it. As a young
actor I used to believe that acting could change society, change the
world. Now I’m a little more realistic.’
For Serkis, acting is a passion verging on obsession. After playing
King Kong `as a lonely psychotic hobo fighting20to survive’, he was
still using his knuckles to get up months later. `Physically you’re
left with hangovers. It was automatic, it’s muscle memory ‘ these
extreme characters have a tendency to overtake you.’ On the Einstein
set in Budapest, he paced up and down a corridor between takes like a
caged lion, rarely talking, unapproachable. The cast and crew described
him as `focused’, `passionate’ and `driven’. Asked about his
obsessiveness, he explains: `Whatever I’m doing at any given moment
becomes the most important thing for me. I become totally absorbed in
the moment, whether it’s painting or acting; I can be pretty full-on.
I’ve always been into acting as a conduit to a greater truth by moving
away from myself. I’ve always had that desire for transformation.’
How does he transform? What’s the process? `You have to put yourself
under the microscope, to open yourself up, to make yourself vulnerable.
Some actors don’t move an inch from who they are, and essentially play
themselves. Isabelle Huppert’s performance in The Piano Teacher, for
example, is one of the most extraordinary interior performances I’ve
seen. Absolutely brilliant. But I need a bigger canvas to get to the
core of a character, to learn something real about the human
condition.’
To avoid going completely barking mad, Serkis drinks herbal tea, never
coffee, practises yoga, and paints whenever he can find the time:
mainly abstract landscapes, the results hidden away in the attic
because his wife doesn’t like them. The most surprising thing about
Serkis is that he is narcoleptic, which means this larger-than-life,
fiercely ebullient actor can fall asleep at any moment. `I always feel
like I’m running at 110%, and then suddenly I can go out just like
that,’ he says, clicking his fingers. `I could be halfway through a
conversation and literally fall onto the table in front of me. My
brother also suffers from it ‘ it’s inherited from my father.’
He talks enthusiastically about how he and his wife, the actress
Lorraine Ashbourne, walk their three young kids across Hampstead Heath
to school each morning, 25 minutes each way. `It’s vastly important for
me to get the balance right between the creative stuff and the family.’
Does his wife insist on it? `Yes and no. I want to be creatively
involved in their development. To be a good father. But it would be a
lie to say they completely understand. They just know that this stuff
[acting] is important too.’ Does he want his children to become actors?
`Not to become actors: I want them to follow their passions. I adore my
kids, but I am also compulsively drawn to my work.
`I’ll tell you what’s interesting,’ he says. `My daughter recently told
me she wanted to act, and I wasn’t sure what to say. You naturally
think about the pressure kids get. You know, acting to them is all
about limos and celebrity. And then she said: `I want to become an
actor because I want to investigate other people’s lives, and to go
backwards and forwards in time.” His daughter obviously admires him, I
suggest. `I just thought that it was pretty extraordinary for a
10-year-old. It was really cool. I mean she knows it’s not
narcissistic. She understands what it’s all about.’
Don’t be surprised if the next terrifying monster you see on screen is,
under all the make-up and prosthetics and CGI, Andy Serkis. There have
also been moments when he has terrified himself. In 1999 he fulfilled a
childhood ambition by climbing the 14,000ft Matterhorn alone.
`Mountains are like being in another world. That’s where I find my
spirituality, I suppose.’ During the nine-hour ascent he became lost in
the dark, and was stuck on a ledge for 45 minutes, unable to go up or
down. `When the sun rose and I saw the drop in the glacier beneath me,
I had to get it together again. There can be huge fear when you climb,
but overcoming that is exhilarating.’