“You wouldn’t catch me dead doing motion capture.” Andy Serkis says that is the kind of thing older actors told him when he played Gollum for Peter Jackson. Others went further: “It’s the end of our profession.” Serkis recalled the reaction in an interview with GQ, and it is a useful reminder of how recently performance capture was a punchline.
The jokes were not subtle. “There were lots of jokes about it,” Serkis said, including Saturday Night Live sketches of people in suits covered in ping pong balls. He did not argue with the mockery. “It was ripe for ridiculing,” he said, “and rightly so.” Even viewers who liked the film sometimes asked who the character was, and whether the man behind him was a dancer or a contortionist.
Gollum, in two steps
Gollum appears briefly in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. The 2002 sequel, The Two Towers, is where the character moves to the centre and Serkis’s capture work is front and back of the screen at once. Animators used motion capture and a rotoscoping technique to give the computer-generated creature Serkis’s facial features, voice and movements. He came back for the trilogy finale in 2003 and for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 2012. In 2003 he won Best Virtual Performance at the MTV Movie Awards for the role, while the trilogy as a whole took 17 Academy Awards.
ComicBook.com later described Gollum as the breakout star of The Two Towers, and said many audiences felt the performance deserved awards attention. It did not bring Serkis an Oscar. What it did, the site argued, was establish him as the leading motion-capture performer, working with technology that other filmmakers then adopted.
From Kong to Caesar
Jackson hired him again for the 2005 version of King Kong, where Serkis was praised for making a huge creature feel human. When the Planet of the Apes series was revived, the studio chose motion capture over actors in makeup, and Serkis played the chimpanzee Caesar, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. Across the trilogy he showed the character changing, as an individual, a leader and a father, though his own face is never seen. Fans and critics expected an Academy nomination. None came.
The work opened other doors. Serkis played Klaue in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Black Panther, and Supreme Leader Snoke in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. In 2018 he directed Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle for Netflix. More recently he appeared in person as Alfred in Matt Reeves’s The Batman and as Kino Loy in Andor.
Sources
- Andy Serkis Mocked For The Role That Made Him A Star | GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT
- 'The Lord of the Rings' Star Andy Serkis Does His Perfect Gollum Impression – ComicBook.com
