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
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 children. “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 fighting to 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.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article5324256.ece
