Inevitably in watching Serkis’s intensely felt performances, all mediated by technological intervention, questions of the continued presence, or absence, of the human arise. The stage seemed his place I never thought I’d next see him living through a puppet as a digital double of a time-decayed hobbit. Serkis was amazing that night, standing, in his folly and aggression and compassion, for all kinds of humanness. Over the years I’d forgotten who played Lear (it was the excellent Tom Wilkinson), but Serkis’s Fool has long stayed with me, ferocious and vulnerable as he was, going on, as I remember it, to hang himself at the play’s end. I first saw Serkis in 1993, playing The Fool as a drag queen in Max Stafford-Clark’s Royal Court production of King Lear. Instead he offers a chameleon identity, almost a romantic ideal of the actor (not the star), someone absorbed in and yet still expressing himself through a myriad kinds of otherness. In doing so, he subverts another key element in our idea of the film star: that is, that they should stand for a particular mode of individuality, an instance of personhood contained in one mortal frame. The immense variety of Serkis’s performances is extraordinary not only has he evaded typecasting, with the help of the digital vision, as no actor could have hoped to have done before him, he has transcended the limits of his physical body. Though he has many notable “live” on-screen roles to his credit, as, for example, Ian Brady in Longford (2006) and as Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010), he is best known for roles where, in a sense, he doesn’t appear on-screen at all, talentedly present and strangely absent.Īs a “performance capture” actor and as a voice in computer-animated films, he has played Gollum (also known as Smeagol) in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and the first part of The Hobbit (2012), as Kong, for Spielberg as Captain Haddock, as Supreme Leader Snoke in the rebooted Star Wars films (2015, 2017), and as Caesar in the latest Planet of the Apes trilogy. Andy Serkis is a new kind of movie star, ubiquitous and invisible.
At the cinema, I watched both Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) unaware that Serkis was performing a major, and even indeed the central, role. Film stars live through recognition, yet Andy Serkis can pass through a film unseen.
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