Smeagol like you mean it

Andy Serkis is a man of many faces. So many, in fact, that it’s been years since mainstream audiences have seen his own on screen. Known as the world’s foremost performance capture artist, his unique skill set has allowed him to play some of cinema’s most iconic characters, including Gollum and King Kong, as well as Captain Haddock in The Adventures Of Tintin and Caeser in Planet Of The Apes.
The next several years will see the 48-year-old actor continue to play digitally-rendered characters, including a reprisal of Gollum for Peter Jackson’s highly anticipated Hobbit trilogy.

However, we mustn’t talk about that. Any and all details of the fantasy epic are under wraps and Serkis has been sworn to secrecy.
“Peter Jackson’s spies are everywhere!” he quips.
However, the actor is more than happy to talk about his latest film, and with good reason.
Death Of A Superhero is the tale of Donald, a rebellious Dublin teenager dying of cancer. Serkis plays Adrian King, Donald’s warm but unconventional thanatologist, or “death therapist.”
Mourning a loss of his own, Adrian has cut himself off from the world. However, through his challenging, tumultuous, ultimately moving bond with Donald, the two characters help each other to appreciate life.
“Death is such a taboo, and it’s a huge fear for me – for everyone. It’s something we don’t confront, which is what makes both characters so interesting. They face it every day.”
A theatre-trained actor, he admits that, while the story was initially what attracted him to the project, he was also glad of the chance to eschew CGI and get back to basics.
“I was in Canada shooting Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes when this script came along. I thought it was the most beautiful, captivating love story. The film’s about burgeoning potential and the inevitable loss of life and it just really spoke to me. And coming off the back of a run of very big special effects-laden movies, it was a chance to plug into the relatively pared back character-driven drama.”
However, while Serkis appreciated the relative purity of the more traditional acting job, he says that his method of approaching the character of Adrian King differs very little from the way he looks at his performance capture roles.
“It seems counter-intuitive to some, but performance capture actually really makes you focus on in the inner life. The really emotional moments of those movies aren’t in the big gestures, but the close-ups. So it really teaches you how to portray the heart and emotion of the character through your eyes, your expressions. And you can’t fake that. You have to feel it. So while people think of it as a physical art, it’s really very much about harnessing the internal emotion, which isn’t that different to any other acting.
So whether it’s Caeser or my character in Death Of A Superhero, I approach it the same way.”
To truly understand the people he is playing, Serkis goes method, completely immersing himself in his roles. Given his penchant for complex, damaged and often disturbed characters, his commitment to his art can be frightening. Indeed, Serkis’ breakthrough role was as schizophrenic tramp Dogboy in April De Angelis’ play Hush in 1992. Sleeping rough in the name of research and naked for the entire play, Serkis says he becomes consumed by the darkness of his roles.
“I see acting as a political tool, and so – particularly when I was a younger actor and it was a very holy activity – I went to great depths for my roles. I still do. However, when you become a parent you have to tailor the amount of time you can stay in character. Dogboy was one of the characters that very nearly tipped me over the edge. You create such a dark reality and it’s very hard to see out of that when you’re in the middle of the storm.”
This desire to explore dark and psychologically complex characters is what drew him to Gollum in Lord Of The Rings. By far his most controversial role, however, was infamous serial killer Ian Brady in the 2006 film Longford.
“That was the one role that people really questioned. They asked me why I would play such character. I think it’s vitally important. That role, more than anything symbolises what I think the job of the actor is: to investigate the darker side of humanity and go there.”
Serkis says that, as a parent, playing a child killer was extremely difficult and emotionally draining. In a chilling way, it also helped him to connect with the character.
“You’re always putting a lot of yourself under the microscope when you play a role. Even if the person is very far away from you, you have to find a channel of communication between yourself and the character. And it does get hard when it’s something as dark as Ian Brady. There was a quote from Myra Hindley talking about Ian Brady saying that for him, the most beautiful, validating moment of his life was when he took the life of a child. And to be able to plug into that you have to examine what the most beautiful thing is that validates your life, and for me that was witnessing the birth of my children. It was intense and pure and validating, so I had to transpose that to the character.”
The actor’s children have also influenced his career in a less discomforting way. He has set up his own performance capture studio in London in order to indulge his art while being closer to home. The Imaginarium is currently producing a partial-performance capture adaptation of Animal Farm, which Serkis will direct and star in.
“It’s a reinterpretation,” he enthuses. “If George Orwell was writing Animal Farm now, he certainly wouldn’t be about communism. It’d be about globalisation and things that affect society now. So the approach will burrow into the fact that it’s a subversive piece, where the politics are couched into a fairytale. It’s a brilliant approach, and by setting our story as a fable, we can pick and choose our politics which is what makes it so interesting.”

See Andy Serkis in Death Of A Superhero from November 30, and The Hobbit from December 14.