Andy Serkis

Andy Serkis is an actor, born 1964.

Andy Serkis was a working English character actor with a stage background when Peter Jackson cast him as Gollum, a part first conceived as a voice job. Serkis played it on set with the other actors and then again in a motion-capture volume, and the result forced a change in how effects films get made: the digital character now had a performance underneath it rather than an animator's reading of a recording.

He then did it repeatedly and at scale, which is the part that matters. King Kong in 2005 is an animal with no dialogue at all. Caesar across three Planet of the Apes films is the harder achievement, a character who begins without language, acquires it slowly, and carries three increasingly bleak films as their moral centre. Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is comic, Supreme Leader Snoke in the Star Wars sequels is barely a person, and Ulysses Klaue in the Marvel films is Serkis unencumbered by any technology whatsoever, having an obviously good time.

He spent years arguing that this was acting and that awards bodies should treat it as such, and he largely won the argument. His own shelf holds an Empire Award and two Saturn Awards for the motion-capture work, plus a BAFTA and Golden Globe nomination for playing Ian Brady in the television film Longford and another BAFTA nomination for playing Ian Dury. He has also become a director, making Breathe and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, in which he voices Baloo, and taking on Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

Movies (55)

TV (12)

Where to start with Andy Serkis

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is where the case gets made. Gollum arguing with himself is a scene with one actor, no visible face and no precedent, and twenty years of digital characters have been chasing it since.

Then take the Apes films in order, Rise of the Planet of the Apes through War for the Planet of the Apes, because the performance is cumulative: watch how much less he does as Caesar gains language. King Kong is the extreme version, an animal role with no words available at all.

For Serkis with his own face, 24 Hour Party People casts him as a deranged record producer and is very funny, and The Prestige gives him a small, precise part in a good film. Black Panther is him off the leash in a blockbuster and plainly enjoying himself. As a director, start with Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, a much darker Jungle Book than the one you are expecting.

The performance-capture roles that won the argument

Gollum was built from a real performance on set rather than drawn over one, and Caesar carried a whole trilogy from behind an effect most people still call a cartoon. Watched together these are the case Serkis spent twenty years making, and it is hard to argue with now.

Serkis with his own face, which is rarer than you think

The capture work is so dominant that the straight performances get forgotten. The Prestige is the best of them, a small bitter part in a film about obsession, and 13 Going on 30 and Long Shot show he is comfortable being funny.

The franchise capture work beyond Gollum and Caesar

Once studios understood what he could do, the offers stopped stopping. Snoke, Ulysses Klaue, King Kong and Captain Haddock are all built the same way, and King Kong in particular is a full animal performance with no dialogue at all.