People will come up to me and try and be secretive and say, ‘Can you do the Gollum voice for me?’ And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? It’s 8:30 in the morning on the Victoria Line.’ – Andy Serkis
The whole chameleon thing about acting. That’s why I’m moving towards directing – it’s a much more healthy occupation. – Andy Serkis
Our family were outsiders, and I’ve always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded. – Andy Serkis
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. – Andy Serkis
I’ve always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession, you have to be. – Andy Serkis
Gorillas have a belch vocalization, which is sort of like, ‘I’m OK, you’re OK.’ They do a pig grunt, which is reprimanding. They sing, they laugh, and they hoot, which grows into a chest-beating display. – Andy Serkis
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. – Andy Serkis
My very, very first moment on set on ‘Lord of the Rings’ in 2000 was me in a lycra suit, six and a half thousand feet up on a mountain in New Zealand, standing in front of 250 crew who were all wondering what I was doing – myself included. – Andy Serkis
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. – Andy Serkis
I have a company in the U.K., a performance-capture studio. We’re looking to push the boundaries of performance-capture technology in film and video games, but also in live theater, using real-time performance capture with actors onstage, and combining that with holographic imagery. – Andy Serkis
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. – Andy Serkis
Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance. – Andy 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. – Andy Serkis
Over the years, people have asked me, ‘Do you think there should be a separate category for acting in the digital realm? Or hybrid sort of awards for digital characters?’ and so on. And I’ve always really maintained that I don’t believe so. – Andy Serkis
If you’re in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared – it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data. – Andy Serkis
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. – Andy Serkis
I would love to direct an ‘Apes’ movie. It would be in the spirit of where I’m going with my career – avatars played by actors to say something about the human condition. – Andy Serkis
Having done a lot of theater, I’m used to sustaining characters over long periods of time. – Andy Serkis
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. – Andy Serkis
You never really know why you become an actor: it’s a visceral thing, an emotional thing. – Andy Serkis
I’d already started directing short films when we were doing ‘Lord of the Rings,’ then videogame projects. – Andy Serkis
In the same way ‘Lord of the Rings’ was an interpretation of the book, ‘The Hobbit’ is being treated the same way. It will be faithfully represented with a fresh interpretation. – Andy Serkis