FROM THE VAULT: An Interview With Andy Serkis (Patreon)

Conducted ~late 2002

As promised, here’s another of my in-depth interviews, straight from my archives. With the recent announcement of a new Lord Of The Rings film from Warner Bros. – The Hunt For Gollum – it seemed like a great time to pull this piece to the fore.

Toward the end of 2002, shortly before he’d return to New Zealand to finish filming on The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, I had the pleasure of chatting with Andy Serkis about his life and career to that point. His performance as Gollum in The Two Towers had recently placed him firmly on the world stage, but he had already been building a memorable string of performances on stage and screen.

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KEN PLUME: Am I correct in understanding you were born in West London?

ANDY SERKIS: That’s right, yes.

PLUME: Now this would be, what, the early ‘60s?

SERKIS: It was 1964, yeah.

PLUME: How would you describe your childhood?

SERKIS: It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.

PLUME: Which is quite an accomplishment…

SERKIS: It certainly is. So she taught handicapped children, and brought us up – we had a lot of au pairs in the house, kind of looking after us when she was away. My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

PLUME: How did those trips affect your worldview at the time?

SERKIS: I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English … I’d seen a lot of the world by an early age – sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I’d seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we’d return to Ruislip in West London … Done a fair bit of traveling really.

PLUME: Would you say that your field of vision wasn’t as limited as that of children who never left England might have been?

SERKIS: I guess I just tend to feel at home wherever I go. Now, it’s had an affect on me later in years, and wherever I go – I really enjoy traveling a lot and feel at home wherever I lay my hat, basically. I can get on with all different sorts of people, I never feel homesick, particularly, or I’ve never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country.

PLUME: So it’s made you more flexible in the long run?

SERKIS: Yeah, I guess.

PLUME: Am I right in understanding that you were very interested in painting?

SERKIS: Yeah – Did you check out my website (http://www.andyserkis.com)? I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me.

PLUME: Something that was encouraged by your parents? Or wasn’t particularly discouraged?

SERKIS: It wasn’t particularly discouraged. I think my mum always wanted me to grow up and get a proper job, but I mean – , it was such an important part of my life, painting and drawing, and, well, I got to the age of 16 – I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. I wasn’t quite sure how you’d become a professional artist, but I thought maybe if I could get into graphics or something like that, or design in some way – and then finally become a painter as well – I’ll do that. So that’s why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics – all of that.

PLUME: What direction did your family try to push you in?

SERKIS: I think my mum wanted me to join the army or something, or become a surveyor – something with good career prospects.

PLUME: Something with a steady income…

SERKIS: Exactly.

PLUME: Did your father have one belief in one way or the other?

SERKIS: I think he just… probably anything apart from becoming an actor, really.

PLUME: Did he want you to follow in his footsteps at all?

SERKIS: No, he never really pushed me in that direction, to be fair. But I think it was the whole kind of art thing – I think it was brought out that he worried that it was precarious, that the art world was a precarious living.

PLUME: Owing in large part, I’m sure, to the fact that your parents were of a very pragmatic generation anyway…

SERKIS: Yeah, of course. Of course, nowadays, there’s no such thing as a stable job.

PLUME: Did the university environment steer you in a different direction, turning you off painting towards acting? How did the acting thing come about?

SERKIS: Basically, in the first year – apart from also doing this foundation course in art – you had to do another subject as well, which I didn’t really particularly want to do. I just wanted to concentrate on my art. But there’s a strong theatre studies department, and I was kind of interested in theater. They had a great studio, called the Nuffield Studio, in which you could basically get involved in productions, and you could design them, or go more in a direction of stage management. All sorts of areas around theater, not just acting … they had production meetings and you’d do the whole thing properly, and you’d have a budget. So I kind of got involved in those productions, on the design side, and then I was asked to act in a couple of plays. Then, I finally – towards the end of my first year – did a play which really kind of changed my life. It was a play called Gotcha, by Barrie Keefe, and I played this role… and I kind of really connected with the whole thing, about acting, and it just literally transformed my life. I hadn’t felt anything as powerful as that – in painting, even. It was just a real calling.

PLUME: If you could sum up one aspect, was it the ability to step into another role?

SERKIS: Yes, it was … I suppose the total liberation. I felt totally liberated and probably at my happiest, stepping into the life of another person.

PLUME: What that means, I won’t even try to read into. So many hidden depths in that! Was the school flexible in changing your pattern, or was it so broad-based that you really hadn’t chosen a line of study yet?

SERKIS: For all intents and purposes, I was going to go on to do painting – I was going on to graduate in painting. So actually, I kind of had to drop it, really. I had to make a key decision … so that was the end of my first year.

PLUME: Was the decision hard, or you were just so elated from the acting experience that – “Goodbye paint!” ?

SERKIS: No, it was an epiphany in that way. I did literally kind of phone home and say, “Hey, you thought it was going to be bad, me becoming a painter? Well, guess what I want to do!” It was literally – it was pretty well overnight. But actually, what you could do in that university – it had a module system where you could construct your own degree. You could do this thing called an Independent Studies Degree, which is what I did. I kind of drew elements from the arts. I still did a little bit of set designing, I concentrated on areas like Stanislavski and Brecht and kind of theater history, and then some more practical stuff like mime and dance. I covered quite a range of different areas, which I kind of built myself, really – this degree. You could build your own degree.

PLUME: As a performer, when you talk about the mechanical aspects of the theater – like stage design or set building, and so on and so forth – how does that aid you as an actor, as far as rounding you out?

SERKIS: I’m really glad that I went that way, and didn’t go to drama school. For instance, playing Gollum is a classic example of where it’s come into use. I’ve really enjoyed the whole technical aspect of it, and I’ve kind of been more open to that than I think perhaps some other actors who might’ve been faced by it, or might not have wanted to get involved in it. And I always tend to see acting roles as a part of a whole, and how the character performs as a function of a story, and I think that’s really important. Also, in my early years of theater, I worked with a lot of people who kind of worked from that basis – that it really is all about storytelling. I was lucky enough to work with people who had strong theories, you know?

PLUME: Is there also a greater understanding – especially when you’re doing stage work – by having that background in having done set design, or stage design yourself? Understanding more fully the world you’re inhabiting?

SERKIS: Yeah… I mean, certainly spatial awareness, and just being able to relate to different environments – to understand the whole semiotic that you’re sending out to an audience, what you’re relationship is within that space and so on.

PLUME: Which is interesting, based on your childhood background of moving quite a bit – of visiting other lands…

SERKIS: Yeah, I have to say, when I was a kid – when I used to go to the theater – I found those worlds very magical. I remember, I think it was Little Shop of Horrors I saw as a kid, and seeing how they painted the brickwork – wow, that was just so amazing. The way that the brickwork was lit on the little shop, you know? It just looked gorgeous. It was very inviting. And again, I obviously kind of wanted to escape somewhere.

PLUME: What’s the difference between relating to it as someone in the audience and relating to it while having to act on a stage like that?

SERKIS: I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, “God, they don’t paint behind the sets.” It’s a bit of a shame, really – “Oh, what’s on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.” I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid … That’s the one thing about moving into working on film, if you like, is that you have all the stimulation there, for real. You’re doing a lot of work on stage from your imagination – you are projecting that space out to the audience. You’re doing a lot of the creating, if you like.

PLUME: Would it have been harder to do a part like Gollum, not having stage experience?

SERKIS: I think so, yeah. Most definitely, because what stage work teaches you is, of course, stamina – emotional and physical and psychological stamina and concentration. You don’t learn that amount of concentration on a film set… It’s a different type of concentration. But to play a role through two or three hours of a night, every night, and to prove it and to constantly evolve it over a period of a run is really where an actor – I mean, I love going between doing theater and film, because it is like you do get your emotional ballast from doing theater, and then you learn in theater, and you carry that with you into acting jobs on film.

PLUME: Do you think it’s because theater is such an intense experience, whereas film is rather fragmented?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah… and also you’re working on your own a lot. It’s to do with energy and reciprocal energy, and actually that is why The Lord of the Rings, works in terms of the ‘acted scenes’ – every actor that worked on Lord of the Rings kind of had that understanding of reciprocal energy. I think, sometimes, actors on film do their performance in front of a camera, and then you do your bit, and they do their bit, and there’s nothing really going on between.

PLUME: Then it’s back to the trailers, and a cigarette.

SERKIS: Yeah, exactly. Whereas, for instance, being able to play Gollum with Elijah and Sean, and come up with all that stuff on those locations and then go through all the technical processes and everything – I think I would have found it really difficult if I’d just done screen work, because I wouldn’t have found the physical vocabulary for the part, or all those things which really allow you to get deep down in a role.

PLUME: Do you think there’s also a certain sense – I mean, you’ve done other film roles – would you say that there was more camaraderie on the set of Lord of the Rings than on the set of other films you’ve done?

SERKIS: That’s a good question. Lord of the Rings is so special anyway, because it took place on such a long period of time, and continues to… although, see, for me – not only was it the principal photography, but then it was going into post-production. My circle of family increased as the post-production stuff took off for me, because I worked with animators and motion-capture people. I went to a whole other realm, really, over the last year. This year I’m going to be doing all the motion-capture and redoing every single scene again with the motion-capture team on Return of the King. So it’s a great camaraderie with the other actors, but I mean, with a huge amount of people.

PLUME: More so, would you say, than other productions you’ve been involved in? Or just a different kind?

SERKIS: It’s just on its own, really, because we’ve all seen each others children grow up, things happen to people – life changing, in what will be four years. So it’s more profound, I suppose. Although there’s been great camaraderie – there’s always great camaraderie on jobs, actually, on the whole, I find. Not always, but on the whole – get a bunch of actors together and they always tend to rap with each other.

PLUME: Four years…You’d be hard-pressed to even find plays that run for that length of time….

SERKIS: Oh sure.

PLUME: In university, did you have classmates that you would work with quite often in productions?

SERKIS: Yes, yeah. There was a team of people.

PLUME: Do you think it’s almost similar to that?

SERKIS: Yeah… yeah, because that was another three year period or whatever – so yes, I suppose you could say you get to know people warts and all, really, over a long period.

PLUME: Going back to college… did it prepare you for a professional career – for actually leaving college? Or was it one of those situations where it was a great environment, but it didn’t really provide the practical aspects for making a career?

SERKIS: I was advised to try and do a post-graduate drama acting year, at an acting college. But I was lucky enough to get my first job. There was a great liaison between the university and the local theater, which was a rep theater – the Dukes playhouse, this was. I kind of, in the last year of being in college, worked a lot down there – helped them build sets and stuff like that as well, and then did some festivals down there, and got to know the director down there. He gave me my equity card and took me on, if you like, as an apprentice – well, not apprentice… he took me on as an actor. At that time, you had to have an equity card to work in the U.K.

PLUME: What was the power of the equity card?

SERKIS: It was like your union card. Every rep theater was given two every year to give out, so they were gold dust. It was a closed shop at the time – you could not work as an actor in the country unless you had an equity card.

PLUME: Are things different now?

SERKIS: Oh, God yeah. Anybody can do it.

PLUME: When were those walls broken down?

SERKIS: That would be kind of around – well, when would it be? Probably around ten years ago, maybe?

PLUME: When you talk about gold dust like that – was it almost like bestowing upon you, “You’re now a professional”?

SERKIS: Oh totally, totally. I felt very superior to all my college friends! No, no… I was just over the moon. One of the funniest and earliest memories I have – this is what it was like – I was so green, I turned up to my first day’s rehearsal, and there was an actor… and he was standing outside where we were rehearsing, and he said, “Can I see your equity card, please?” I said, “It hasn’t arrived in the post yet.” He said, “Well, you can’t come in. Sorry.” He was just sending me up, completely – a complete wind up. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I stood around outside, believing I wasn’t going to be allowed into this rehearsal.

PLUME: So it’s something that could very much demoralize an actor?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah. Actually, equity was quite strong at the time. We had strong work ethics and practices, and you had to get this amount of subsistence, and I remember getting the regional equity deputy to come down to us, and it was all quite militant, and “We’re not going to do this, unless we get our proper money.” And actually, it was quite effective – because nowadays, conditions have got worse for actors, I think.

PLUME: Do you think there could be a time where something like equity would make a comeback, or are those days over?

SERKIS: Well, you have SAG – which is so much stronger – and I think because people really do hang together and believe in its power, they get things done, I think. Whereas I think we had problems, basically to do with funding. The money dropped out of the regional arts during Thatcher’s time on the planet.

PLUME: A wonderful way to describe it.

SERKIS: So, basically, the whole kind of thing just got demoralized, and every actor had to do more work for less, and you know the score…

PLUME: Do you think equity had a chilling effect on bringing actors into the fold – where people just couldn’t break through that wall, and turned to things like, say, the army?

SERKIS: No, I think people really… well, put it this way – there weren’t that many reality programs then, and not everybody could get work as an actor. It seems to me now that anybody who’s on a reality TV program stands as good a chance of being in a movie in this country than people – God, I sound so bitter, don’t I?

PLUME: But it’s happy bitter. It almost seems like, in a way, the flip side of the coin was that equity was a way of weeding out the people whose heart wasn’t in it completely.

SERKIS: I think that’s what it was, in a way. People who really wanted to do it, found a way there. By hook or by crook, they worked out their contracts – like my wife. She sang around all the clubs, and she got her card that way. People really, really went for it, because they believed that that’s what they wanted to do.

PLUME: Now, around this time, weren’t you in touring companies – shortly after the Dukes Playhouse?

SERKIS: Yeah. The Dukes Playhouse, that was my kind of defining – as they say – apprenticeship, really. Jonathan Petherbridge, I owe an enormous amount to, really. He was the director who took me on, and his philosophy really affected me for a long time, in terms of how the theater related to the community, and his whole attitude towards theater being about storytelling – as I was saying to you before – and the power of changing a local community with theater, you know? So I carried that ethos with me a long time.

PLUME: Which seems to be a dying art, in some respects…

SERKIS: Yes, yes, absolutely.

PLUME: What were his beliefs on casting? I mean, you have a lot of people that will be pushed into particular roles within productions – say the comedic role, or the lead role, or so on. How would you describe the characters that you were cast in during that period?

SERKIS: During that time, I basically covered a whole range. Went from Brecht to Shakespeare to new, kind of modern British playwright plays, to pantomimes – that’s what I mean … they were just all very different and required different skills – playing different age ranges, completely different parts of society, it was great. It was a tremendous kind of year and a half, really. I couldn’t have personally wished for – I know that’s where my enjoyment of acting comes from, is from inhabiting other characters, and really deeply getting inside another person’s head. To be able to do that so regularly, and to be performing one and then rehearse another, it was just a joy really. So when you go into something like touring companies, I took all that with me, all that wealth of stuff, really. I did a play like Bouncers, which was with Hull Truck – again you’re playing five, six characters – so I’d kind of learned how to do that.

PLUME: What are the difficulties in touring companies? What are the challenges that are unique to that?

SERKIS: The great things are a new town every week, and the downside is the digs and all that – where you’re staying is generally pretty cramped at that level. Of course, you’re doing it for no money, and you’re doing it all yourself – that’s enjoyable, at that level, when you’re that age.

PLUME: Because it’s an adventure at that age…

SERKIS: Yeah.

PLUME: Now, I’m sure, it would be a pain in the ass.

SERKIS: Well, now – with kids and a family – I just can’t imagine it, quite frankly. They were great days, because they were formative years, as they say … You visited art centers, and again – it was the stuff that you really believed in… and I’m not saying that I don’t believe in stuff now, because I do, but it was just fueled by that youthful enthusiasm.

PLUME: Do you think your passions as an actor change and evolve, the older you get?

SERKIS: I think I’ve got a bit better, because I don’t care so much. Not that I don’t care so much, but I care in a different way. I have to work quicker, really, and I have to work more instinctively now, because I’ve got family, and they feed hugely into my acting. Sméagol is my son, basically. I mean, he really is – so much of Sméagol is based on my son. It’s always a lot of life experiences that you’ve accumulated on the way, obviously …

PLUME: As a young actor, would you say that you were fueled by a sense of blind enthusiasm? That you were less discerning?

SERKIS: I think you’re always looking for methods, and you’re looking for – look at his career, and he’s that kind of actor, and I want to be like that. You’re defining what you really are as a person and as an actor, and what your take on the world is, and how you choose to use your acting.

PLUME: I guess, if you want to make a craftsman comparison, those early years are trying out all the tools you can, and then eventually learning which tools work well – “This drill isn’t as good as that drill.”

SERKIS: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think some of the stuff that I did – it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? But it might be as good as the stuff that I’m doing now, or it might be better… I don’t know. It’s a curious one. I suppose I’ve evolved a kind of a theory about acting, which is – I kind of see it as being paid to go and investigate. Being paid by – and it kind of sounds really wanky – but being paid as a sort of investigator, to go and dig up what you can about this person that you’re going to play, and bring back all the information, and show it to people. It’s me whose doing the investigating, so obviously my take is going to be what they see. I suppose it comes from this director, Jonathan Petherbridge, who I spent a lot of time with – he used to do a lot of workshops based on this guy called Augusto Boal, who did this theory of acting called “forum theater.” This guy, Augusto Boal, used to work in Brazil – go into villages and do these plays which were done by the locals. He’d get them all together and they’d literally workshop what their common problems were for wherever they lived. If it was oppression by the police, it would be that. And basically, they’d come up with their own plays, and then everybody who was in the audience could step into the play at any moment and take over the main protagonist’s role, and change the course of the play. I’ve kind of drawn from that, really. The way that Augusto Boal – he wrote this book, Theater of the Oppressed, and he talks about acting in terms of …

PLUME: Fluidity?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah… being able to really go – the job is to bring back the evidence. Go out, research it as thoroughly as possible, inhabit it, bring it back, and get it to the audience – and so what I’m getting at in my rather long-winded way, is saying it is about getting it to the audience.

PLUME: Were there any times where your investigations have failed? Where you couldn’t dig up the evidence you needed or the trail was cold?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah… God yes. Well, where do I start?… In The Winter’s Tale – I played Florizel in The Winter’s Tale – and found nothing of any interest to show anybody.

PLUME: How do you vamp when you encounter something where you haven’t found anything?

SERKIS: It’s just that you emotionally cannot transmit anything that’s going to mean anything to anybody.

PLUME: It’s just a matter that you stick with the text and you’re a warm body on stage – how do you feel mentally?

SERKIS: Let me think – you just keep trying to get there, but it’s only in hindsight that you realize that you’ve completely fucked up, basically. All the time that you’re doing it, you’re trying different things – every night you go and try and find a different way into the part. If you’re really floundering, it’s just a sense of feeling totally unrooted, and that’s because you’ve not found something to connect with.

PLUME: So it’s just a desperate attempt at forward movement?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah… just kind of flailing around wildly, trying to find something of interest that will work, really.

PLUME: Do you find those moments occur less and less the older you get? Or is it wholly dependent on the material?

SERKIS: Yeah, it absolutely depends upon the material. Who knows, when I was doing that Winters Tale, maybe I just wasn’t emotionally in touch with what was going on there … That material was Shakespeare, really, so I couldn’t blame him.

PLUME: Oh go ahead, he’s not going to argue…

SERKIS: Oh, all right. I mean, you can make bad scripts work – especially in film… you’re required to a lot, believe me. You’re required a lot of time to do damage limitation on not very well written scripts – I won’t go into which ones, particularly. It becomes about, again, drawing from that emotional ballast that I was saying, from theater work.

PLUME: I know that you’ve mentioned in previous interviews that generally, when accepting an already established role – which obviously everything in Shakespeare is – that you tend not to go and do research on other people’s performances…

SERKIS: Oh sure.

PLUME: Is that so the material lies solely within your investigation, within the context of the written word, and what’s presented?

SERKIS: Yes, absolutely. It kind of comes down to – I really don’t like sort of having your mind infiltrated by being over-stimulated by previous performances. I just don’t find it helpful… I don’t find it helps you get inside it. It’s just a comparison thing, and so I just tend to kind of stick to the relevant – the world that we’re creating, wherever the director’s leading you. Whatever the “in the moment” decisions are with working with the other actors.

PLUME: Often, how deep would your research go? Would you research the historical perspective of the material?

SERKIS: Yes. For instance, when I did King Lear with Max Stafford-Clark, I played the fool in that, and it was set in a Victorian context. So what we wanted to do was find a relationship – it’s all about the relationship really, of the Fool to Lear, to make it work. It’s not like this clown on the out on his own, so we decided that Lear has his three daughters, but where’s his wife? So we decided to make the Fool, basically, the woman that Lear could relate to – a man, in drag, as a Victorian music hall performer. So I then went down this whole line of research, all the kind of drag acts of the time, that existed in the Victorian music hall, and all the different sorts of the way they operate. In great depth, what their satirical styles were, and their different ways of performing. Then I could draw from that. I sort of created my own act, if you like, and then brought that back into the play, and wrote songs and drew from the original music hall songs, and rewrote them with Shakespeare’s words. I kind of did all that stuff, so that I could then bring back to the relationship with Lear this sort of wealth of music hall stuff, and that would be the way that we’d have an understanding with each other…

PLUME: Do you think it’s in some ways creating a safety net as well, as a performer? Where you’re always going to have something to draw on during the performance, to where you’re not left in the lurch at all?

SERKIS: Yeah, I think it’s to do with really feeling, physically, vocally, and kind of mentally rooted to the role, and you do that in a variety of different ways … If you work with someone like Mike Leigh, it’s through finding a touchstone character – someone that you can base your performance on, a real person within your age range. When you work with Mike Leigh, for instance, you go through lists of maybe 100, 200 people that you know that you could base the character on. I mean, he works in a very extreme way. The way you work with Mike Leigh is you do this – you do this short listing… it’s like having basically like having a one-on-one with a therapist, really, for the first few weeks working with Mike Leigh. You go in with this list, and then he’ll short list it down to one person, and then that becomes your touchstone character. Then you invent this new character, but the traits will become really based on what this real person in real life is about. Then you kind of go through the character’s pre-history, his heritage, his grandfather, grandmother, all the family, and then you’ll literally … kind of like rebirth in a way. You carry on through up until the present. When you start filming is when you’ve got up to the present day, you know?

PLUME: So you’re building the world the character inhabits…

SERKIS: Yes, and that can go for months and months and months. On Career Girls, I was playing this future’s broker, and I went and ended up working in the city for four months with these future’s brokers. I learned how to trade, I hung around with them – they became my mates. I only watched films that the character would watch, I only listened to music that the character would listen to, I didn’t see any of my friends – you totally become absorbed into this world. In fact, they said to me, “Hey, why don’t you just jack the film and come work for us? You’ll make more money, and we can start you off at $50 – 60,000 a year, and a bonus on top …” Before you know it, you’ve entered into this whole kind of psychology and way of being. I was turning up at home at 4:00 in the morning, having been out with a load of future’s brokers, and Lorraine, my wife, was just thinking, “What’s going on?”

PLUME: At what point does that sort of method acting become a detriment?

SERKIS: I have to say, I’m kind of quite in favor of method acting, and it’s just I don’t really have time to do it anymore, that’s all. I’ve got other things to fit into my life, which feed my acting. A lot of characters I played in the years where I came to London, and started the London theater work, I was much, much more involved in method acting and kind of nearly sent myself insane playing one role – Dogboy – which is quite close to Gollum in many ways. It’s this homeless youth who had a dog – he’s kind of schizophrenic who killed his dog and became it, basically, and broke his way into this middle class household and held them all hostage. So I spent a lot of time out on the streets and being homeless, and did all that and stuff, and just isolated myself totally, and just kind of really got myself into a place of great despair. That was probably the most extreme, extreme I’ve gone, but I really did do myself in, and it took me a lot of time to come out of the decompression from that one.

PLUME: Do you think that doing method is a luxury that having a family doesn’t afford you?

SERKIS: Yeah. The thing is, with Gollum, I did spend a lot of time on my own as well, because I was away in New Zealand and away from my family for large periods of time – I did have that sense of loneliness… it did affect me as well. This is all bound up with, I suppose, an enjoyment of – that’s what we started talking about originally – you know, I do feel incredibly liberated when I’m inside another’s skin, basically, and so method does afford you that, hugely.

PLUME: As far as Method goes, I suppose there’s a difference between drawing upon the loneliness you had of being separated from your family in New Zealand, and going down to the river and beating a fish on rocks and eating it raw…

SERKIS: Yes …

PLUME: I mean, that would be the true method way of doing it, wouldn’t it?

SERKIS: Well, yeah… yeah… yeah, absolutely, and I did a fair deal of crawling about rocky pools on my own, but I mean, what I’ve learned is finding what’s appropriate to the job. And also, the older you get, you can slightly take more direct roots, because you may have even been there before in other things, or you’re using skills that you’ve accumulated to get you there. Now, I don’t get hooked up on one particular methodology of working. And also, that’s the other thing… you work with so many different directors – Max Stafford-Clark, Mike Leigh – you know, that have hugely opposing methods and, as an actor, you’re drawing from lots of different directors all the way down the line, and so you do work as a magpie, and you pick up lots of different ways and apply them to whatever’s appropriate.

PLUME: I don’t mean the word in its derogatory state, but do you think the more experienced you are as an actor, the more shortcuts you learn? Of getting to a part?

SERKIS: Well, that sort of sounds like …

PLUME: Not using the derogatory meaning – to say it better – quicker paths to the end result, than perhaps the dead ends you might once have gone down when you were younger?

SERKIS: Yeah, maybe… maybe. I think that’s probably true.

PLUME: Now, at what point did you start to get TV and film work?

SERKIS: That would be… I suppose I got a major TV break in the early ‘90s, really.

PLUME: Was it easy to make that transition? Because it seems to me, when you look at the British acting community, there wasn’t the same kind of stigma on TV and film work that there is when you talk about American stage actors and how they view it… and vice versa.

SERKIS: No, I think that’s probably true, actually. There is more traffic between all of the – it was quite an elite thing to do film in this country, during the ‘80s, because there just wasn’t a lot of it going on unless you were in the Merchant Ivory club. There were hardly any films being made here.

PLUME: So, essentially, you’d have to move to get film work.

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah.

PLUME: Was there any thought of that at any time for you – of moving to the States?

SERKIS: No, because I was still very much a theater actor at that time, during the ‘80s, and still felt I was just kind of learning, really. I think the British mentality of that time – it isn’t so much now, but from my generation of actors – was you start of in theater, and then you did your telly, and then you did film… which is exactly what I did. But now it’s curious, because all young actors – virtually nobody does theater, they go straight into the telly jobs or come and do film. They’re so much more business kind of orientated than I ever was when I started out. The whole kind of learning process as an actor changed from just purely it being about creating a role, to creating a business for yourself and getting a publicist and doing all that side of thing. I do think I was kind of one of the last generation of actors who did rep theater and had the luxury of working, rehearsing one play, and performing another at the same time. That just doesn’t happen anymore. There just aren’t those places to do that.

PLUME: What are the differences that you see in actors that you’ve worked with in, say, film or TV, that haven’t had stage experience?

SERKIS: I think that in some cases there is a slight lacking in terms of reciprocal energy, is how I’d say, mainly. That’s what I was saying before – you do your performance, and I’ll do my performance, and …

PLUME: So it’s a very shallow sort of experience?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah – I think people who have worked on stage just convey – they literally push through. They push across the void between what’s going on with the camera, beyond the camera – even if they’re standing behind it, they’ll work their socks of acting with you. You work with people who are just really more interested in acting to the corner of the matte box, because their eyeline’s better at the camera, and then you work with people who play the scenes with you properly – it’s really what happens between people, for me, that’s interesting.

PLUME: Is it frustrating for you then, to be in a scene with someone who’s playing to the camera angle?

SERKIS: Unless it’s absolutely necessary – it’s going to make the shot look ridiculous if they’re not. On the whole, obviously there are no hard and fast rules, but you know when an actor is giving their 100%, because you’ve given your 100% to them, and you know when people are just kind of coasting it because they’ve done their shot. That really does piss me off, when I work with actors – I wouldn’t dream of not giving 100% to someone, even if I wasn’t on camera. I just wouldn’t do it. I think most theater actors feel like that, because they’re used to giving that amount of reciprocal energy on stage. It’s really what happens between people… that’s how I see it. It’s how it works between you and someone else that makes drama interesting.

PLUME: How do you work around that, when obviously you’re dealing occasionally with someone who’s just not in it?

SERKIS: Well, obviously you build up a kind of survival kit to deal with that. It’s just not as interesting, and not as gratifying, or satisfying – because there’s nothing like it when a scene’s flying between people. You feel like you’ve really made a moment happen, and then, yeah, you can walk away at the end of the day thinking, “I did quite a good job on that scene, and I think I got away with it.” Again, for me – because of being on stage, working on stage a lot – you’re always coming home at the end of a night’s performance thinking, “Well, I was in it there, and I kind of want to try that tomorrow night,” or “Why didn’t that work?” So you’re constantly re-examining and reworking stuff.

PLUME: Do you think that’s one of the deficits of TV or film work, because of it’s fragmentary nature? That you really don’t evolve in certain scenes, because once a scene is shot – it’s over, it’s done, it’s in the can?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s true. On the other hand, I do enjoy both, because I really do enjoy the spontaneity of creating a scene knowing that you’ve only got really a few takes to get it right, and that does push you into a different gear – because you know it’s concentrated, it’s for a few minutes, so there is an enormous amount of satisfaction of working off instinct and the moment as well, rather than the long run of a play or whatever. So, for me, the ideal is moving between the two, between stage and film, for that reason – so that you’re constantly acting like a pair of bellows. You know that you’re exercising all your different acting muscles, and they just definitely feed each other.

PLUME: I wanted to ask you about Hurlyburly – a tremendous success…

SERKIS: That is one of my favorite stage experiences, as well.

PLUME: How would you describe that experience?

SERKIS: Basically, working with Rupert Graves – whom I became very close friends with afterwards, and other great cast members-Stephen dillane, MarkBenton – and the director, Wilson Milam. He’s just – he’s great. He worked with Steppenwolf in Chicago, and he does a lot of American plays in the U.K. – he was a real kind of revelation for me, because one thing I realized is that British acting on stage tends to be quite polite in many ways. It’s sort of, “You say your line and I’ll look at you, and then I’ll say my line, and you focus on me.”

PLUME: So very mannered…

SERKIS: Kind of thing – but generally, it’s the person who speaks who gets the focus. With Wilson directing in Hurlyburly, it was just like – he really understands behavioralism, and basically we just create this world. It was very, very free, and the whole thing just became like an improvisation every night. It was so freed up. It was really exciting and it changed every night. Phil, the part I was playing, was just a dream part, really.

PLUME: What is it like to be a part of something that is a huge success like that? Is it markedly different from what it’s like to be in a play that runs for a week and a half and closes?

SERKIS: Yes… oh definitely. It’s like this – it’s like Lord of the Rings … Being a part of a success – it doesn’t come that often, and the only other times it’s happened to me has really been in a play called Mojo, which was a huge hit at the Royal Court Theatre… and that was just a buzz going out and playing in front of full houses, knowing that the audience was getting it. The thing with Hurlyburly – the audiences were just so into it, and it’s the same with Lord of the Rings. Those are, I think, the three kind of highlights for me.

PLUME: How important to you, as a performer onstage, is the audience and the audience’s involvement in the material?

SERKIS: Totally, because chemically they change every night, onstage – they change every night. They become – I never see them as passive… they’re a living, breathing organism. That’s the other thing – as a young actor, you tend to judge them as a mass. You tend to kind of go, “Oh, they’re a bit this tonight,” or “they’re a bit that tonight,” or “Hmmm, they were very quiet.” As you get older you realize audiences are made up of lots of different people, and some of them have had a shit day at work, and some of them have, whatever, taken drugs – I don’t know. I think in this recent production of Othello that I’ve just done, at the Royal Exchange Theatre, playing Iago – it’s an incredible theatre, an indoor round space, and you really get the sense of close quarters. It’s a 750 seat theater, but it’s like a chamber theater. It’s completely in the round… it’s like a cylinder. You can really sense every single, individual member of the audience – especially with Shakespeare. It worked perfectly in there, and especially the part I was playing. I could relate to the audience, too, as Iago did in soliloquies. I was very much feeding off of who they were…

PLUME: Do you sometimes become so attuned to the audience that it negatively affects your performance?

SERKIS: Yeah, sometimes you do… you can feel a kind of iciness drift across, but you just – that’s really more to do with you being self-conscious, I think, and more to do with what you’re feeling like on that particular night.

PLUME: Actors often talk about feeding off a wonderful audience – is there a point where, once you realize that you’re getting a pretty bad vibe, you stop feeding?

SERKIS: Oh, absolutely. It is always a mystery – that one night the play will go fantastically well, and then the next night… it’s a huge kind of unanswerable question, really, apart from the fact that, well, of course the audience is different every night. But then the next night it can be a pile of shit. I think, for me, it tends to work in cycles. This is how it works for me – you’ll have a run of a play, you start off… finding new things… you’re in the moment… things are flying… you have a good run of a few performances… then you hit a bit of a plateau. Then it kind of tends to dip off, and then you get the things that didn’t work last night become compounded, and that next night – you kind of go into a bit of a dip. It’s a real kind of waxing and waning kind of thing for me. I always know when I’m about to go into a bit of a dive, and it’s so depressing. You just know it. Maybe that’s just my kind of map, you know.

PLUME: Is that when the instincts kick in?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah. Then you’ve really got to just knuckle down …

PLUME: So it’s the kind of thing where you can see the island, so you’re always swimming towards shore – but if a wave comes along, you’re going to take advantage of it…

SERKIS: Exactly, exactly.

PLUME: Well, another film I definitely wanted to touch on was Topsy-Turvy, which was the first role I ever saw you in…

SERKIS: Oh, really?

PLUME: Wonderful, wonderful performance. What was it like, working with Mike (Leigh, writer/director) on that?

SERKIS: That was quite an extraordinary film to work on because, as I’ve explained to you, the way that Mike works. With this, because the characters were all historical characters and they’d actually existed, we all had to thoroughly research them. There was kind of two levels, really. He still did the finding your touchstone character – who you’re going to base it on – but then it was, like, you had the accumulated knowledge that all those characters would have known about each other in the Savoy Company, which all had to be thoroughly researched. For instance, John D’Auban, I basically had to know. I actually knew every piece of choreography for every single Gilbert & Sullivan opera that he programmed, through finding old copies of scripts with his notations on. Some of the way I related to the chorus in that, in the improvisations that we did, I actually physically choreographed them. I found out about his background – his background was fascinating. He was known as a pantomimic dancer, and at the time there was this fashion of dancing called legmania which had become really popular, and he was a real pioneer of that. He taught classical ballet – he was a real whirlwind of energy, this guy, and he’s well documented. Then, we found out that he used to play the violin at the same time as choreographing to keep the tempo – this is over, like, nine months of rehearsal. I learned Irish dancing, and I did ballet for six months. The thing with Mike is, you never know how much you’re going to end up it the film.

PLUME: It’s a good thing he wasn’t a neurosurgeon, as well…

SERKIS: That’s it exactly … After you’ve done all this individual research, then you’d have group research – because of course, all of Mike’s films are initially improvised, so you’d have to improvise in the idiom of speech of the day, you’d know what the catch phrases of the day were for 1885, what was commonly being spoke, the words that were commonly being spoke, and you’d know what kind of street food that they would be eating – and I knew that he’d always be eating on the run, because he was always between this that and the other theater… what trams he’d catch to work… and what the currency was, and how the currency operated… the political history of the time. So there’s a whole kind of social world. Once you’d done all that research, you’d get to improvise. We had some of the most incredible improvisations. There’d be, like, 70 of us in the “Savoy” Theatre – which is actually the Richmond Theatre – just being in character for hours and hours and hours on end. Mike kind of wandering around, observing, and really kind of assessing what he’d then put into the movie. I guess it goes back to the whole painting thing as well. Process for me is really interesting, and I enjoy that as much as the final product. You certainly wouldn’t work with Mike Leigh if you didn’t enjoy process.

PLUME: So building up that final product off of that blank canvas…

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah … On a whole, the things that I’ve enjoyed most are things that I know have had a lot of process, and have had a lot of time put into them. Like Lord of the Rings. Peter will have spent seven years on these films, and I really admire that amount of application, I suppose, and love being involved in big projects like that.

PLUME: Do you think it would have been difficult to do what you’ve done in Lord of the Rings not having, say, the experience you’ve had with Mike Leigh?

SERKIS: Yeah. Again, that was another example of embodying the character, finding him physically, and – you know – just learning how he speaks, and all that. In a way, Gollum feels – not that I was destined to play the role, but that it’s in a vein of parts of extreme characters, that I kind of tend to get cast as.

PLUME: In comparing the two, how straight-jacketing is it – or is it at all – to play a historical character?

SERKIS: Not really. I didn’t find it straight-jacketing because, again, it’s so much to do with interpretation – which is why, you know… getting back to not looking at other people’s roles, really. There are pictures and all sorts of things and documentations about the character of John D’Auban, but ultimately it’s how you draw on that material and chose to serve it up. Actually, recently I auditioned – CBS was doing this big thing, I didn’t get it – to play Hitler, and you kind of think, “Well, everything must have been said about Hitler, we must know everything.” But the script was kind of curiously sympathetic toward him – just treated him as a human being, and I guess that’s what I try and do with acting. Just normalizing the extreme, and finding as much range to what you would consider that you’d know about a character. I think one would play Hitler in a particular way and think, “Well, that’s how he is.” But I think normalizing someone like that is far more interesting, really.

PLUME: So it’s almost like looking for the needles in the haystacks, weeding out the extraneous material?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah, I think so… looking at the fact that he was a child once, really, and basically – I don’t think he probably intended to go the way he did, but that’s to do with choice. I think a lot of the roles, like Phil in Hurlyburly, like Bill Sykes – I played Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist – you could play them all as pretty nasty guys, really, who’ve got no redeeming qualities, and I think it’s important to try and redeem… like Gollum too… find redeeming qualities in these characters to make audiences ask questions, really, and do a lot of work for themselves, and not feel like they’re being served something. To make the audience work, really … what they believe about humanity…

PLUME: Another role I wanted to speak briefly about, which I enjoyed quite a bit, was your role in Shiner.

SERKIS: Oh, right.

PLUME: Which should have been seen by more people…

SERKIS: It wasn’t, yeah. It was quite an interesting script, and some not bad performances in it, but it ultimately didn’t kind of do it, really, I don’t think.

PLUME: Working opposite Michael Caine…

SERKIS: Yeah – he’s extraordinary, that man. I’ll never forget sitting in the read through for that, and it’s very rare that you work with kind of icon film stars – and he is in our country, he just is. It’s like Sean Connery and Michael Caine, really. You’re sitting in a room and you think, “Who’s that person doing an impersonation of Michael Caine?” Oh – it’s Michael Caine.

PLUME: When you get to a point when the person sounds like the impersonation …

SERKIS: Exactly, exactly.

PLUME: I can’t imagine what it’s like acting opposite someone iconic like that.

SERKIS: I loved spending time with him. He’s a really sound man. What I love about him is his kind of workman-like ethic to the job, really – he turns up and he does it. I remember – this is a prime example of what I’m talking about – just after that read through that I was just talking about, we had to go and chose some hand props for our characters. Now my character, Mel, spent a lot of time on a mobile phone, and I remember there was a whole box of phones, and I remember going up and going through each one – there was a Nokia, and a this, and a that, and I spent ages kind of choosing which mobile phone for my character. Bill, who’s the first AD, said, “Michael, would you like to come choose yourself a briefcase?” And Mike just came over and picked the first one up and walked away. It’s just like – yeah, okay, fair enough.

PLUME: So much for method…

SERKIS: It was an experience for me. He just wanted out – he wanted to chose his briefcase and go and have his lunch.

PLUME: Do you see yourself ever getting to that point?

SERKIS: Well, again, maybe what he’s doing is he’s just cutting out the bullshit, basically, and kind of going, “Well, I know what he wants.” Maybe that’s accumulated knowledge. Maybe that’s, “I know exactly what my character needs, and it’s that,” without having to go through the agony … Again, it’s like working with directors with different methods. You work with someone like Michael Caine – he’s been around for such a long time, and you can absorb some of his work methods. He is a master, and you watch him on screen – I do think he’s really good in that film.

PLUME: Oh, it’s a wonderful film – it’s a shame more people didn’t see it. Now, I guess the best way to do this would be chronologically… When was the first inkling that you got of the Lord of the Rings experience?

SERKIS: I had just been auditioning to play Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, and this was as the Hubbards were casting. I got a call from my agent – the first thing I heard about it was, “Andy, look – they’re doing this film, Lord of the Rings, down in New Zealand, and I want to get you in for an animated character, to do a voice … It’s like three weeks work.” So I thought, “Jesus, there must be a dozen good roles in that… why can’t they get me up for a decent part?” And they said, “And it’s Gollum,” and I kind of vaguely remembered Gollum from The Hobbit, which I’d read when I was at school. Then I come home, and I said to Lorraine, “They’re doing Lord of the Rings, and they want to get me in for this animated voice.” I mean, I’d never done anything like that before. But they’d kind of got the wrong end of the stick. Then when I went in and talked to John Hubbard about it, he explained slightly more about the approach that Peter was going to take the role in. Basically, I quickly read some sections of Lord of the Rings – I’d never read Lord of the Rings – and then worked on an approach to that version of the voice, and then I went and did my first audition on tape, and that was sent to Peter. He came back really quickly, and kind of was quite excited about it. He flew over to London and was casting out all the other parts, all the other British actors, and we met. As soon as I met he and Fran (Walsh) – and I kid you not – the energy that I felt going into the room, and between the two of them, really… they’re so potent… so powerful, potent human beings. They’re extraordinary people, and I kind of fell in love with them immediately. Kind of a powerful moment, really, and basically he explained to me that no, it wasn’t going to be just an animated role – a voice over. He wanted an actor to play the part, but finally what would be on screen would be a CG character. You’ve got the majority of the scenes with Gollum in three-hand scenes. Gollum is a driving force in most of the scenes, in terms of the impact he has on the other characters. You can’t have two actors and a tennis ball on a stick – you need a strong actor to play the part.

PLUME: Right.

SERKIS: So basically, we kind of talked about how this was going to work, and eventually it was like, “Okay, so you’re going to come down to New Zealand and play the role, and then the animators are going to …” They’d already decided it was going to be CG, but the thing that he was most interested in was the reciprocal energy between the three actors in those scenes. I kind of at first thought, “God, I could physically play this role – I just know I can play it, and why can’t we just use prosthetics and stuff? I know I could do it live action.” But he’d already gone down the line of wanting to do it CG. So we got down there, the process evolved over two years …

PLUME: Did you have any idea what the time commitment would be like when you said yes?

SERKIS: No, no… not at the time. Really, it’s increased and increased the more…. basically, the defining moment in the change was when – which I’ll tell you about in a minute, really, in the process – but was when we decided to use motion-capture more than was going to be originally intended. Originally, it was going to be my performance that would be the essence of the character of Gollum. I’d find a voice, and be the essence of the character, and then the animators would animate on top of that. But kind of fairly early on, I think Pete saw that the way I approached the role was – as I worked with a lot of characters I’ve played in the past – with total embodiment. When he saw me kind of doing it in the early part of principal photography, I think he realized that he had someone who could play him, really, fully. So he kind of took that stage further, and decided to use motion capture a lot more than he originally intended. Basically, throughout principal photography, me, Elijah Wood and Sean Astin shot every single scene in the whole of the three films that we have together… well, mostly the Two Towers and Return of the King, because Gollum doesn’t return that much in the first one. But for all intents and purposes, I played Gollum. We shot every scene conventionally. We’d rehearse the scenes, Pete would block them, and we’d work out the dynamics, the beats of the scenes, what the drama of each scene was, and we’d shoot them. I’d crawl around, doing the voice of Gollum – I was being Gollum. I wasn’t in costume, because there wasn’t a costume – I was just wearing a skintight suit. Then they’d always shoot two versions – one with me on camera acting, literally on camera with Sean and Elijah, and then I’d do a version stepping off camera. Sean and Elijah would act to the void where I once was – having encoded the scene that we’d just done – and I’d do the voice off-camera, giving as much vocal energy, and also I’d kind of show them the moves so that they could mime exact moments. To pinpoint exact moments and stuff. Then, that would leave the animators two kinds of routes to go down. They either basically roto-scoped over my exact movements – if Peter liked a particular take, he’d get the animators to literally paint frame by frame over my exact moves and my facial expressions and everything – or, using the second take with them acting to the void where I once was, I’d then go back in post-production, which is basically all during 2002, to do motion-capture. It’s basically kind of acting as a virtual puppeteer. You wear a suit with dots all over it, cameras pick up all the dots, and in real time I could see this computer generated image of Gollum – which if I moved my right arm, then Gollum in real time would move his right arm. So a year later, really – after the principal photography – I’d be on my own in the studio, redoing all the scenes… every single scene, doing it. That’s when we really got to hone the performance, physically.

PLUME: Well, to some extent it was mime, wasn’t it?

SERKIS: Well, kind of. I was miming to them, Sean and Elijah, because they weren’t there.

PLUME: But the motion-capture, that was fully …

SERKIS: Yeah, that was fully acted. I mean, again, I had to get into character and get my head back into the scenes and play emotionally as truthful as I did on set, because the whole thing about motion-capture is it is highly sensitive to breath… to any kind of incidental movement. That’s what kind of gives motion capture, in a way, a very strong spatial relationship, really, because all those incidental moves – slightly kind of tripping or falling, or things an animator wouldn’t necessarily think to put in – that’s what motion-capture’s fantastic for. It just gives it an extra feel of reality.

PLUME: So if your heart wasn’t in the scene during motion-capture, it would be betrayed …

SERKIS: Oh, totally. Because they also shot video cameras on my face, as well, for a facial performance. I had dots all over my face. The muscle structure of Gollum was redesigned, during filming, to be much more like me. So in fact, there’s a marked difference between Gollum in Fellowship of the Ring and Gollum in Two Towers, because a year after the shooting of The Two Towers, an animator called Bay Rait basically redesigned the whole face to fit around my muscle structure – so every expression, really, is based on my facial expressions.

PLUME: And this was also around the time that the decision was made to do the flashback sequence, wasn’t it?

SERKIS: That’s right, yeah. Pete and Fran, they’d written this sequence of Sméagol killing his cousin Deagol for the ring, and I got to do that for real. So you actually see me on screen as Sméagol, and then the whole descent into madness, using prosthetics. So that was again, a whole – finding a physicality for Sméagol, before he became corrupted by the ring. I’d made the character decision to make Gollum on all fours. He didn’t necessarily have to be, but because of the way I played him as an addict, I wanted him to be physically, completely wrecked by this power of the ring. I wanted you to see the effort of Gollum’s ruin, rather than him being almost kind of like a supernatural alien that could fling around. I wanted to see the pain in every bit of his movement and effort, and the cost that it had on wear and tear on his body. So that’s why he crawls, and that was my kind of input into a major character decision, really. So then, to play Sméagol, to have him upright on two legs and be a hobbit … it was like – you know those pictures of the evolution of man, going from an ape to a human?

PLUME: Right.

SERKIS: It was like doing that in reverse, basically.

PLUME: What would you describe as your motivation as the character of Sméagol in the flashback? What was he in your mind, talking about the research you do, as a person?

SERKIS: At every turn, really, with this – I’ve tried to stop it from floating off into a generalized mythological approach. I tried to craft modern analogies for everything… The ring became about addiction – this whole addiction thing that it was like a heroin addiction. For Sméagol – in the book, he’s from a fairly middle-class Stoor hobbit background, and the ring affects you according to your moral stature, says Gandalf… So it’s like a murder out of naïveté and innocence…

PLUME: It’s rather petty…

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah. This thing corrupts him very quickly. Just as soon as he sees it, he’s caught by it. It could have gone the other way… it could have corrupted Deagol as well. It could have taken him. Again, there’s a sense of a loss of innocence, and a fall from grace. Basically, it’s like Cain and Abel, and I kept hanging on to this kind of image, really, of him being a child just going wrong – just this best friend or cousin or whatever, you know, killing this person before even realizing the power that this thing was having on him.

PLUME: I suppose, in the schizophrenic sequences, it was along the lines of the atrophied conscience being the Sméagol personality trying to reassert itself…

SERKIS: Exactly, exactly. He then became this kind of abused child by Gollum. He crawled into the Misty Mountains and goes mad in this toughened shell of Gollum that has kind of survived as a predator – the kind of revengeful side kind of takes over, and the self-loathing, and that side of him completely crushes this innocence, and it’s banished forever. So when Sméagol then comes across Frodo and he’s actually reminded what it’s like to be human, this abused child kind of outs his parent, basically – outs his abusive parent. Fran Walsh, who did a lot of the writing of Gollum, she has such a deep understanding of the role, really. That’s because she’s got children of her own… I’ve got children, too. We drew a lot from our children’s perspectives of the world.

PLUME: You were mentioning that you based a lot of Sméagol on your son – what aspects of that?

SERKIS: Apart from anything else, Sméagol looks like my son and Gollum looks like my dad. The animators did so well there, to capture that gene – they really did. The scenes where he’s being dragged by the rope and he’s thrashing around, and he kind of has these moments of mock theatrics – it’s just exactly like when I drag my son through a supermarket and he’s trying to pull every single can of beans off the shelf, you know? Then the sweets are at the counter, and he’s kind of by now hysterical. It’s scenes like that. Then, the kind of childish, growing trust between Sméagol and Frodo is very parental. The whole bond between Frodo and Gollum became about these kind of – moving away from my son for a sec – became about two addicts at kind of an AA meeting, really, is what it amounts to. They have this understanding about what the power of the ring does to you, which Sam has no idea of.

PLUME: In a weird sort of sense with Frodo being his sponsor, let’s say…

SERKIS: Yeah – exactly. Or Frodo looking at Gollum, thinking, “This is where I’m heading. This is exactly where I’m going, because the ring’s beginning to take a grip on me.”

PLUME: So it’s Gollum looking at Frodo, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s Frodo looking at Gollum, seeing the train…

SERKIS: Exactly.

PLUME: How would you describe your back and forth with Elijah Wood during the filming?

SERKIS: Acting with each other?

PLUME: Yeah.

SERKIS: He’s a consummate – he really is an incredibly wise human being, Elijah. I loved working with Elijah, and Sean. I mean, they’re both tremendously giving actors, and very generous, and they had to work really hard, because I was giving quite a big performance. Quite a big physical and vocal performance, and then they had to do – they really had to believe it. They were definitely great fun to work with, and very, very on top of the material and charged with great energy. Elijah was – I think we really had a good rapport. It was fantastic.

PLUME: Well, it’s amazing how many people talk about – for such a long, involved, arduous production – how, and I don’t want to use the word idyllic, but it wasn’t as strained or frayed as one might expect from such an intense experience…

SERKIS: No, it really wasn’t. I think because people were so far away from home, and we all knew that we were involved in a special job. I mean, going down to New Zealand, it was like you stepped off the plane and you knew you were stepping into a different kind of existence. You’d be surrounded by so much talent, and so much creativity, and you just got a buzz off it. You just kind of thrived on it. Everybody was so passionate about telling this story, and as I said, my circle of colleagues just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and I just used to be in awe of their skills. The first time I got taken on a tour around WETA, I was just blown away by it – by the sheer kind of volume of creativity, really, and the amount of artists working there.

PLUME: And the enthusiasm?

SERKIS: Yeah, enthusiasm… and also because I think what Peter’s great at doing – it’s like a real melting pot. On most films you work, people stick within their job descriptions, and then they get pissed off if you go pick up a lamp stand and you’re not in their union or whatever. Whereas with this, it was a sense of everybody having a go at doing something they weren’t necessarily trained to do. You got people who’d throughout the course of the principal photography – up to camera assistant and beyond – had a go at everything. You had people who made chain mail who would then be working on miniatures, who would then be out on set spending all night working on building another set. It created its own rules.

PLUME: Do you think it was almost similar to the broad-based experience you had in college?

SERKIS: Very much so, which is why enjoyed it so much. I had to embrace, as I said, a whole lot of different skills, and I loved it. I just really, really loved it. I loved working in motion-capture, and I loved working with the animators. One of the greatest thrills for me was once we’d done the motion-capture and they’d then taken it and started layering the skin on top and working through, facially animating everything. I’d then go and have one-on-ones with all the animators to get back to the drama of the scene. Because, obviously, you’ve got 40 animators working on a scene, in segments, and working on frames – maybe a collection of frames – and you’re kind of going, “Well, that beat isn’t quite working,” or “This is what we’re after at this point,” or “He’s expressing too much pain here…” So again, as the emotional kind of guardian of the character, I was able to have more collaboration – even into that late stage of animation.

PLUME: I guess one aspect we didn’t discuss was the evolution of the voice. How similar was the voice you did on the audition tape to what eventually wound up on screen?

SERKIS: The essence was kind of quite similar, because I think that’s what Peter really wanted. But it evolved, and it evolved into two voices – Sméagol and Gollum. At the time, I just did a very prototype Gollum kind of voice. The voice kind of arrived because I wanted to, again, not just find a creature voice – because it’s quite specific. It came out of, obviously, what Tolkien had written, and Gollum sounds like he does because – as Sméagol – he’s banished from his community because of this sound that emanates, this Gollum sound. So I wanted it to be kind of bound up with really where he carried his pain. For me, that was his throat. That seemed like the guilt of killing Deagol was trapped there, and it was almost like a kind of a muscle memory spasm – like Tourettes Syndrome. He would say, “Gollum! Gollum!” A lot of the times in the script he says, “Gollum! Gollum!” I wanted that to be an involuntary kind of action. So it was like a spasm. I was trying to find a way of constricting the voice – that’s what kind of sparked the whole thing off. Then, actually, I also drew a lot from… we had three cats at the time. When they get fur trapped in their throats, their whole bodies convulse and they kind of throw up these fur balls … That constriction became, “Gollum! Gollum!” That became the way of doing that. So again, it’s rooting the psychology, rooting the physicality, rooting the emotions – tying them all together so that nothing was arbitrary. Gollum was such an extreme looking thing that he had to be solidly based in human emotion to get that tension. I think, ultimately, why it kind of works in a way, looking back on it… I think – although in that flashback sequence, it was great to work in prosthetics, and to go through the transformation into Gollum – in my head, I actually began to imagine that the state of being a CG character was part of the state of the way that the ring affected you, if you like, so that was the final stage of the process. I managed to incorporate even that into an acting process, if you understand what I’m saying.

PLUME: Sort of a removal of humanity?

SERKIS: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

PLUME: Comparing the two Sméagols, what’s the difference between pre-ring Sméagol and the post-abuse Sméagol?

SERKIS: Sméagol, before he’s corrupted by the ring, he’s kind of inquisitive. He’s described as inquisitive – he’s always burrowing and looking into the roots and meanings of things. He’s just like a child who put a fly under a glass and watched it kind of die – but out of fascination, you know, not realizing that it was killing anything. So, I suppose you could see that as a flaw in his personality, but it’s kind of in an innocent way.

PLUME: An ignorance of consequences?

SERKIS: Yeah. So that’s how I kind of approached him before he became corrupted by the ring. Then, basically once he became kind of crushed by this thing, and choked by it, and realized he was in its thrall, that it basically – that chink of light, as Gandalf describes it… his soul… just kind of gets squashed, and would never have come out again, if had it not been for coming across Frodo.

PLUME: One scene in particular I wanted to ask about – how was it actually performed – would be the argument between Gollum and Sméagol over Sméagol trying to reassert himself against Gollum…

SERKIS: The central kind of schizophrenic scene?

PLUME: Yes, that one.

SERKIS: All three main schizophrenic scenes, if you like, were shot in one take, like a theater performance. I did both voices … both personalities vying for supremacy. We shot it on location … the scene in its original state was about a three minute scene, three and a half minute scene, and then we motion-captured it, and I did it again. Basically, it was done as a performance piece. It was done as a single performance piece, because there was no other way of doing it. That’s where the theatrical training, if you like, paid off.

PLUME: Being able to keep that intensity and momentum going?

SERKIS: Yes. Yeah, and to really hone down, throughout each take, to really find the actual – THE way of doing it, really.

PLUME: It was really a tour de force, and I mean that in no small way…

SERKIS: Oh, thank you. It is my favorite scene, for me personally, because I know how closely – in fact, New Line has got this fantastic reel together as a way of explaining, and they’ve got my original performance on set next to the fully animated face, just to show exactly that it comes from an actor’s performance. It’s been really strange, because I had to do this big press junket, as everybody did. Everybody else just gets to talk about their characters and how they approached the roles and everything, and what fun they had doing it, and I have to kind of go through this whole explaining the process to everybody. Because I’ve had so many questions from journalists like, “Did you actually have to go down to New Zealand to do it?” or “Did they digitally enhance the voice as well, or did you actually do the voice?” Nobody has to explain their character as much as I do.

PLUME: Almost defending your participation in the film…

SERKIS: Yeah, exactly, and it’s really difficult. When people keep asking this question, “Do you think you should be nominated for an award?” it’s like, well, the animators have done an amazing job, and they deserve all the applause that they will get – because visual effects will win all these awards, anyway – but from an acting point of view? Peter Jackson and New Line have been really supportive, kind of recognized what I’ve done in this, and really kind of pushing for a nomination – and the analogy that people have been using, is to …

PLUME: John Hurt…

SERKIS: John Hurt in The Elephant Man. And I guess it’s quite a useful analogy, really, because they have an actor whose created a physicality and a voice, and a psychology and an approach to a role – you don’t recognize him at all – and a lot of his performance is about a look, and the look is created by a team of artists. In that case it’s prosthetics, and in my case it’s digital artists applying, as I think Peter says, applying pixels after the fact, instead of latex before. Defending your own performance to people, and sort of saying, “Of course I should be nominated,” is a bit tough.

PLUME: Then you get those headlines: SERKIS HAS EGO…

SERKIS: Yeah, exactly … where do you draw the line? People say, “So how much of you is up there on screen? Do you recognize yourself up there?” It’s like, well, yes of course! Because the performance is strongly dictated by what I’ve done, and one doesn’t want to tread on anybody’s creative toes and upset anybody, but that’s what I think Peter – I’ve really fulfilled what he intended to do with the part. Although he didn’t feel an actor could play the role per se, in terms of up there on the screen, manifested in the flesh – basically, an actor’s played the role and what’s manifested is a digital version of that.

PLUME: I think the remarkable thing, for me, coming out of Lord of the Rings was you didn’t think “CG character” – you thought “character.”

SERKIS: Oh yeah… well that’s great. People have been very, very generous in praising me on this, and I kind of say to them, “Well, I’m just absolutely thrilled that it’s worked.” I’m relieved – because Jesus Christ, if it would have gone wrong, I never would have worked again. I think everybody felt the pressure at some point, that it wasn’t going to get there, or that it had to work, because Gollum represents what the ring does to you on a personal level – and the audience’s way of connecting to that.

PLUME: Did the talk of awards nominations surprise you? Because the weird thing about The Two Towers was that none of the prior press releases or trailers – or anything – focused on Gollum at all…

SERKIS: That was a complete decision to kind of hold him back as a secret weapon, really.

PLUME: Which few studios would do…

SERKIS: Yeah, I think that shows confidence, really. Because Harry Potter had posters of Dobby out and stuff, and they felt that Gollum was going to be highly anticipated … I’m really, really glad they did that.

PLUME: It made for a nice surprise – whereas with Dobby, it became, “Oh, they could have done that better.” When you see Gollum onscreen, it’s just a complete shock at how well done it was, and how good the performance was… that instead of anticipating it, like you said – you were surprised by it.

SERKIS: Yes, I think that’s true, and I think that’s very clever on their part.

PLUME: Now how accurate – I’ve heard rumblings that all this awards talk is aggravating the animators in New Zealand, and supposedly Peter had to send some letter to apologize to the animators – have you heard any of this type of feedback?

SERKIS: No. Well, the only thing I picked up on was Harry Knowles’ Ain’t It Cool Review of Two Towers saying something like Gollum’s been seven years in the making, and the animators created the look … he was saying it shouldn’t be nominated for a mere supporting actor – Gollum should be nominated for a special award, because it’s the collaborative team’s efforts. It’s funny, because you’re the first person that I’ve heard that from, directly from, that that’s been going on. I’ve kind of felt it might be happening, but I didn’t realize Peter had to write a letter.

PLUME: From what I’ve been told, Peter had wrote a letter that was distributed to all the animators, basically saying, “I’m sorry, I’m recognizing the work that you did, and I’m quite proud of the work you did, and this is New Line and the awards season, and I just want to make sure that there were no hurt feelings, and your work is appreciated.” I can see your point of view, that they’re going to be awarded – it’s pretty much a given – with the special effects Oscars.

SERKIS: I would think.

PLUME: And it shouldn’t have to be a fight.

SERKIS: Yeah, we shouldn’t get into a fight about something that, really, we’ve all made work terrifically well. I don’t see why it has to be either/or. I’m not saying, “Well, I’ve purely done this performance, and the animators had a little bit to do.” I’m saying, “God, you know, I did my bit as an actor, and they’ve done their bit as animators, and look what we’ve come up with!”

PLUME: It’s not like you’ve ever said, “God, I am the king! I’ve done it all!”, so I don’t know how people could accuse you of that…

SERKIS: I hope so. I hope that’s come across. I’ve talked about it purely from an acting point of view, because that’s my job, you know? I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with that one. But it seems crazy that there has been all this collaboration and really great kind of feeling, that at this point it should get kind of picky, really.

PLUME: Leave it to the Oscar – the great destructive force…

SERKIS: Exactly.

PLUME: So, at what point does the performance start winding down for you? I mean, as you said, you’re going to be pretty intense this year wrapping up Return of the King, right?

SERKIS: Yeah. I suppose there will be reshoots, and then I’ll be doing all the motion-capture for Return of the King, and then they’ll be revoicing – so I mean, it’s a good few months work, this year. I suppose towards September, that will be it, really.

PLUME: Is there a particular sequence in Return of the King that you’re looking forward to? Or that you’re quite proud of, since you’ve already done it during the principal shooting?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah – there’s a whole culmination of Mordor really, the Crack of Doom and all that – it’s quite exciting. I’m quite looking forward to seeing that.

PLUME: Now has there been talk, since you would be an integral part of it, of doing The Hobbit?

SERKIS: No, I’ve not heard anything. I mean, faint rumors, but not from anybody who’s kind of …

PLUME: So not from Peter or Fran…

SERKIS: No, no.

PLUME: Is it something that you would look forward to doing?

SERKIS: I guess so. I mean, I would definitely do it, because I think it would be great fun to do, and I think I’d find it hard to say good-bye to Gollum and let somebody else – really kind of pass it on, because he’s been such a part of my life.

PLUME: So it’s something you’d definitely not be adverse to, if it was to present itself?

SERKIS: If it was – no.

PLUME: Transitioning out of Lord of the Rings – you also had a pretty nice part in 24 Hour Party People…

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah.

PLUME: A great little film.

SERKIS: Did you like it?

PLUME: Yes, a good deal.

SERKIS: It was good fun to do, really good fun to do. Boy, that was an interesting shoot. They had a lot going on there. That character, again, one of life’s great consumers, really, of all things.

PLUME: It was Martin Hannett?

SERKIS: Martin Hannett, yeah. Genuinely, he had such a following, because we worked with a lot of people who knew him personally, and there are so many great stories about him.

PLUME: Which one crystallized the person for you? Or was it just the consumption?

SERKIS: No, it was just the fact that he was like a mad professor kind of – he was a real pioneer, and just loved experimenting with everything, absolutely everything. I really enjoyed playing a character like that … I loved the fact that Martin Hannett actually loved ABBA.

PLUME: Speaking of bitter irony…

SERKIS: I think that’s really funny. That makes me laugh every time I think about it.

PLUME: And you’re also in Deathwatch…

SERKIS: That’s right, yeah, which I don’t know if that’s come out in the States.

PLUME: It’s a World War I horror film?

SERKIS: Yeah. That was quite an extraordinary film to shoot. It was a really intense time, shooting in Prague in the winter. I think I mentioned it on my website – it was a pretty grim, grim kind of shoot. But really good actors in it, and had a great time shooting that. Again, I play this kind of desensitized, trophy-hunting nutter.

PLUME: Seems to be a running gag now…

SERKIS: Yeah … I might have gone one step too far on that character. I don’t know. Apparently Jonathan Ross said that I overacted hugely.

PLUME: I guess that could be considered one step too far. So, I’m assuming your run of Othello has wrapped?

SERKIS: Yeah. In fact, I had to come out of it early, because I injured my back. I slipped a disk in my back, and had some really bad problems with the sciatica, so I had to come out a couple of weeks early.

PLUME: Have you recovered from that okay?

SERKIS: Yeah, it’s getting better now. I’m doing work with a physio.

PLUME: Just in time to completely push it out of joint again with the motion-capture…

SERKIS: Yeah, exactly.

PLUME: Well, what does the immediate future hold?

SERKIS: Well, at the moment, I’m kind of being seen for a few different films. The Gersh Agency have signed me up, in L.A. So I’m going over there and doing meetings and stuff. I’m just kind of meeting a whole new load of people, really, because it’s quite a good time to meet American directors and so on, who’ve all seen the film, and now I’m trying to let people know more – kind of connect Gollum to the fact that, you know, this isn’t the first job I’ve ever done in my life.

PLUME: Well, the website helps with that…

SERKIS: Yeah, well, absolutely – and that’s been getting a huge amount of hits, really. So, I’ve been concentrating on that. I’ve not as yet got anything solid lined up …but it’s just the beginning of this phase, really.

PLUME: Now, would you say that you’re happy with where you’re at, right now, in your career?

SERKIS: You know, Gollum is… You don’t come across these roles very often, and the fact that it’s taken a long time, I think – when I was shooting at times, and all of the other actors were going home at the end of the day with scenes in the can, and I’m thinking, “Jesus, I’ve done this, but this is only the first stage” – I never had that sense of completion on a day to day basis. The psychological stamina it took to come back and revisit the scenes was quite wearing, really. But, now having got that done, I now think, well, I wouldn’t have had it any other way, and I’m quite glad. It will have been worth four spent years on the part.

PLUME: Worth it considering the final effort, the final product?

SERKIS: Yeah, I think so… that’s what I mean. I had to watch it a fair few times before I could really let go, because I did know every single frame of it incredibly well. That’s where I am now. It’ll be hard to find another part that’s going to really top that for a while, I guess. I’m going to try and really hang out for those kind of interesting roles to keep coming along.

PLUME: Has there been any thought of moving behind the camera – either writing or directing?

SERKIS: Yeah, yeah. I’ve just directed a short film, and I’ve been writing a couple of projects on the go. One is an original screenplay which I’ve been co writing for a few years with my wife Lorraine, and I want to make that, and an adaptation of a book – Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel by Robert Tressel. There’s been quite a lot of interest in that, from actors who want to kind of attach themselves to the project. We kind of want to make it by actors – that’ll be a kind of cooperative approach. This other screenplay is an original story, based on a real person. So yeah, I really do want to get behind the camera, because I love that side of it, and I really thoroughly enjoyed making my short.

PLUME: And perhaps inspire people, similar to Jonathan Petherbridge…

SERKIS: Hopefully.

PLUME: Which would be a nice bit of full circle, passing on the information that he taught you…

SERKIS: Yeah, exactly … it’s about handing it down. It’s all about storytelling. Which is why I loved working with Peter, actually. Peter and Fran and Philippa, they really understand the art of storytelling, and that’s why everybody has pretty well had a good time working on this film. It is a great story, too.

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