Andy Serkis
| Sci-Fi/Fantasy | |
| IMDB.com |
He was born Andy Serkis on April 20, 1964, in Ruislip Manor, West
London, England. He has three sisters and a brother. His father, an
ethnic Armenian, named Serkissian, was a Medical Doctor working
abroad, in Iraq, and the Serkis family spent a lot of time traveling
around the Middle East. For the first ten years of his life Andy
Serkis used to go backwards and forwards between Baghdad and London.
His mother was busy working as a special education teacher of
handicapped children, so Andy and his four siblings were raised with
au pairs in the house. Young Andy Serkis wanted to be an artist; he
was fond of painting and drawing, and visualized himself working
behind the scenes in productions. He attended St. Benedict's School,
a Roman Catholic School for boys at the Benedictine Abbey in London.
Serkis studied visual arts at Lancaster University in the north-west
of England. There he became involved in mechanical aspects of the
theatre and did stage design and set building for theatrical
productions. Then Serkis was asked to play a role in a student
production, and made his stage
debut in Barrie
Keefe's play 'Gotcha'; thereafter he switched from stage design to
acting, which was a real calling that transformed his life.
Instead of going to an acting college, in 1985 Serkis began his
professional acting career at the Duke's Playhouse in Lancaster,
where he was given an Equity card and performed in fourteen plays
one after another, as an apprentice of Jonathan Petherbridge. After
that he worked in touring theatre companies, doing it for no money,
fueled by a sense of enthusiasm, moving to a new town every week. He
has thus appeared in a host of popular plays and on almost every
renowned British stage. In 1989 he appeared in a stage production of
Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', so beginning his long association with the
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where he would return many times
to appear in 'She Stoops to Conquer', 'Your Home in the West' and
the 'True Nature of Love' among other plays. In the 1990s Serkis
began to make his mark on the London stage, appearing at the Royal
Court Theatre as the Fool in 'King Lear', making his interpretation
of the Fool as the woman that Lear, a widower, could relate to - a
man, in drag, as a Victorian musician. He also appeared as Potts in
the hit play 'Mojo', playing in front of full houses and earning
huge critical success. In 1987, Serkis made his
debut on
television, and he acted in several major British TV miniseries
throughout the 1990s.
In 1999, Andy Serkis landed the prize role of Gollum in
Peter Jackson's
epic film trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's saga 'The Lord of the
Rings'. He spent four years on the part and received
awards and
nominations for his performance as Gollum, a computer generated
character in The Lord
of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) which won 11 Oscars.
Gollum was the collaborative team's effort around Serkis's work in
performance capture - an art form based on CGI-assisted acting.
Serkis's work was an interactive performance in a skin-tight CGI
suit with markers allowing cameras to track and register 3D position
for each marker. Serkis' every nuance was picked up by several
cameras positioned at precisely calculated angles to allow for the
software to see enough information to process the image. The images
of Serkis' performances were translated into the digital format by
animators at Weta Digital studio in New Zealand. There his image was
key-frame animated and then edited into the movie, Serkis did have
one scene in the Return of the King showing how he originally had
the ring, killing another hobbit to posses it after they found it
during a fishing trip. He drew from his three cats clearing fur
balls out of their throats to develop the constricted voice he
produced for Gollum and Smeagol, and it was also enhanced by sound
editing in post-production.
Serkis spent almost two years in New Zealand and away from his
family, and much of 2002 and 2003 in post-production studios for
large periods of time, due to complexity of the creative process of
bringing the character of Gollum to the screen. Serkis had to shoot
two versions for every scene; one version was with him on camera,
acting with (chiefly) Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, which served both
to show Wood and Astin the moves so that they could precisely
interact with the movements of Gollum, and to provide the CGI
artists the subtleties of Gollum's physical movements and facial
expressions for their manual finishing of the animated images. In
the other version, he'd do the voice off-camera, as Wood and Astin
repeated their movements as though Gollum were there with them; that
take would be the basis for inserting the CGI Gollum used in the
released movie. In post-production, Serkis was doing motion-capture
wearing a skintight motion capture suit with CGI gear while acting
as a virtual puppeteer redoing every single scene in the studio.
Additional CGI rotomation was done by animators using the human eye
instead of the computer to capture the subtleties of Serkis'
performance. Serkis also used this art form in his performance as
Kong in King Kong
(2005), which won him a Toronto Film Critics Association
Award (2005) for
his unprecedented work helping to realize the main character in King
Kong, and a Visual Effects Society
Award (2006) for
Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture.
Apart from his line of CGI-driven characters, Serkis continued with
traditional acting in several leading and supporting roles, such as
his appearances as Richard Kneeland opposite Jennifer Garner in
13 Going on 30
(2004), and Alley opposite David Bowie in
The Prestige
(2006), among other film performances. On television he starred as
Vincent Van Gogh in the sixth episode of _Simon Schama's Power of
Art (2006)_, the BBC2 series about artists. Serkis is billed as
Capricorn in the upcoming adventure film
Inkheart (2008).
At the same time, he continued the development of performance
capture while expanding his career into computer games. He starred
as King Bothan in martial arts drama
Heavenly Sword
(2007) (VG), a Playstation 3 title, for which he provided a basis
for his in-game face and also acts as a dramatic director on the
project.
Andy Serkis married actress and singer Lorraine Ashbourne, and the
couple have three children: daughter Ruby, and two sons Sonny (b.
2000) and Louis George (born 19 June 2004). Away from acting, Andy
Serkis is an accomplished amateur painter. Since his school years at
Lancaster, being so close to the Lake District, Serkis developed his
other passion in life: mountaineering. He is pescetarian. Serkis has
been active in charitable causes, such as The Hope Foundation which
provides essential life-saving medical aid for children suffering
from Leukaemia and children from countries devastated by war. In
October 2006 he was a presenter at the first annual British Academy
Video Games Awards
at the Roundhouse, London. Andy Serkis lives with his family in
North London, England.