Andy Serkis
I do have anger management issues. Not clinical. Probably no more than most people.Collection: Anger
I think parenting is very different now. We're totally governed by our children!Collection: Parenting
Climbing's always been a massive hobby of mine up until, kind of, recent times when I've had family, but no, it's been a driving passion in my life, and, uh, I've always wanted to climb the Matterhorn. It was the mountain that, sort of, inspired me to climb, as a youngster.Collection: Family
Every age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a huge part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are enthralled with video games in the same way as other people love the cinema or theatre.Collection: Love
I think the actors in 'Greystoke' were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who's, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.Collection: Amazing
I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.Collection: Communication
If it was a great script and a great character, I would love to do a romantic comedy.Collection: Romantic
Be magnificent. Life's short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone.
When you have children, you realize that at the end, it's all about passing on, about handing down.
Not a day goes by where I'm not reminded of Gollum by some person in the street who asks me to do his voice or wants to talk to me about him. But because 'The Hobbit' has been talked about as a project for many years, I knew that at some point I'd have to reengage with him.
Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.
I had to relearn how to ride a horse like an ape. I had to change how I jumped off and how I gripped them with my thighs and distribute my weight differently.
I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.
J.J. Abrams and I met, and we just had this incredible kind of vibe between us.
I have a road bike and a mountain bike, and I tend to use them both a lot. They help you keep your balance and your stamina.
After 'Kong,' my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character... You are telling your body that you are these things and that you're feeling these thoughts and that you're experiencing these experiences.
I'm quite contrary. If people agree on something, I tend to gravitate the other way by my nature. I don't like to be told what to do. I think it goes back to school. I like to do things I want to do and I really don't like doing what I don't want to do.
I think Caesar is one of the most empathetic characters that I've played. I think that's the key to a successful leadership. Being able to keep your ears open at all times.
It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.
Gollum's never really gone too far away from me because he's indelibly kind of printed into my DNA now, I think.
I do love nature, but I don't suppose I'd spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!
My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.
'Macbeth' is an amazing story.
Just being an ape is a workout.
In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.
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 Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.
When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.
I had a cat called Dizz, after Dizzy Gillespie.
I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.
Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.
For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.
Acting is a sort of pressure cooker that allows the fizz to come out the top. God knows what I'd be like if I didn't have that.
Working with and collaborating with and for Peter Jackson was an incredible experience because he is such a phenomenal filmmaker.
Gollum is Gollum - though in 'Lord of the Rings' he's 600 years old and in 'The Hobbit' he's 540, so he looks a little bit more handsome.
The wonderful thing about 48 fps is the integration of live action and CG elements; that is something I learned from 'The Hobbit.' We are so used to 24 fps and the romance of celluloid... but at 48 fps, you cannot deny the existence of these CG creations in the same time frame and space and environment as the live action.
When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.
I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character.
Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it's just another way of recording an actor's performance.
An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.
In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part.
I think there will always be a particular generation of actors who... think that they're going to be replaced by robots. But certainly the emerging actors... understand that that's part of the craft.
I've always thought of acting as a tool to change society. I watch a lot of actors and I see panic in their eyes because they don't know why they act and I know why I act. Whether I'm a good or a bad actor, I know why I do it.
A lot of actors on film sets... very often they're not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I've always had that awareness and that's something that I've wanted to bring in to go beyond acting... As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked.
'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.
I love acting and certainly won't give it up, but it's part of a bigger canvas for me now.
I'd already started directing short films when we were doing 'Lord of the Rings,' then videogame projects.
I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.
We've never had nannies. We've had great grandparents, great support from family, and the kids have been on every set: they've seen me play Gollum, King Kong, Captain Haddock, the lot. They totally get it, and they want to go into the business. Ruby, my daughter, is very keen to become an actress.
More and more good actors are now transmigrating into the videogame space and playing roles there because it's where my generation of kids get stories from.
The fact of the matter is that an actor, if I'm playing a performance capture role and you're playing a live action role and we're having a scene together, there's no difference in our acting processes.