Gollum’s life beyond Middle Earth

Andy Serkis sits in a plush but overheated hotel room in West London. Despite the soporific surroundings, he’s full of energy, his unruly curls tied back from an expressive face that right now seems alert, interested and wide-awake. But when he’s tired, he tells me, he tends to fall asleep.

A couple of days before we met, he’d dozed off on the subway, and was woken by a woman nudging him insistently. “Are you the guy who does all the monsters?” she asked, as he opened his eyes. “You play that whatsisname from Lord of the Rings, don’t you?”
“It’s Gollum,” said Serkis sleepily, then looked up to realise that the train was full, and that his slumbering form had become the centre of attention. “The woman was going, ‘That’s it! You’re Gollum!’ and the whole carriage was staring at me. That was a weird way to wake up.”

His popularity shouldn’t be particularly surprising. As well as the hugely successful Lord of the Rings, during the past decade Serkis has starred in a string of blockbusters: King Kong, The Adventures of Tintin and the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But although his performances are central to those films, his face doesn’t appear in them at all. Only his facial expressions.
Whether he’s playing Gollum, Kong, Tintin’s sidekick Captain Haddock or Caesar, the super-intelligent young chimpanzee who ends up leading a revolution in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, what you see on screen are his movements, his expressions, his voice — but all overlaid with a digital skin that makes him appear as a realistic-looking monster, ape or animated character without costume or make-up.

Gollum was his first venture into the field that has made him famous. Yet when he got the call asking him to go to New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings in 1999, Serkis was a bit miffed it wasn’t for a better role. As the hobbit horribly corrupted by the magic ring at the centre of JRR Tolkein’s epic, he thought he’d probably end up being heard, but not actually seen.

However, once he was on set, his body distorted into the creature’s shape and he started whispering “My precccioussss!” in a voice inspired by the sound of his cat coughing up hairballs, it became clear to director Peter Jackson that they could push the whole thing much further. So Serkis ended up working with Weta Digital, the special effects company set up by Jackson in 1993 with a small group of other young New Zealand film-makers.

When he first played Gollum, he didn’t dream he’d still be talking about the role 12 years later. Yet our meeting in London is to do just that. “Going back into shooting it this time was a strange feeling,” says Serkis, “Everything was moving the same, everything was sounding the same — but I wasn’t feeling it.”

Physically, too, he felt the difference 12 years can make. “There were leaps from rock to rock that I made last time with ease that didn’t quite happen this time,” he says drily. “I grazed my shins a few times.”

Serkis works wearing a Lycra bodysuit covered in markers to aid the computer animation later, and a cumbersome head camera to capture the nuances of his facial expressions. It’s only at the end of the process, when the film has been edited to the director’s satisfaction, that the special effects team adds the digital skin. In the Rings films, Serkis acted alongside the rest of the cast, but then had to recreate his performances alone afterwards, for the special effects cameras. Now the technology has evolved to enable his final performance to be shot at the same time as the other actors.

The efforts Serkis puts in for his roles is significant. For King Kong, Serkis spent hours with gorillas, observing their behaviour, and bonded especially with Zaire, who lives in London Zoo. To play Caesar, he would go running, doing the first few miles as a biped but returning on all fours, as a chimp runs.

This kind of immersion in a role is something he’s starting to move away from. Instead, his main focus is on The Imaginarium, a company he’s set up with producer Jonathan Cavendish to develop and realise performance-capture projects in the UK. The company is training a team of actors in performance-capture techniques, and has generated its own film projects, including a film version of the forthcoming fantasy novel The Bone Season, by 20-year-old Oxford student Samantha Shannon, and a new take on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which Serkis will direct. As well as working on a number of television series and computer games, they’re in discussion with everyone from dance companies to fashion students. “What I love is the diversity that The Imaginarium’s bringing in, the people that we’re meeting,” he says with satisfaction. “Every day is something completely different.”