Andy Serkis on the new ‘Luther’ film, more Tolkien and almost becoming a City trader
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Andy Serkis has been offered many jobs. Most famously, he was hired to play Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But over a long, stellar career, headline bosses have also included Christopher Nolan (The Prestige), Steven Spielberg (The Adventures of Tintin) and JJ Abrams, who cast him in Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens.
Yet there are other roles to which Serkis said no. Among them was the full-blown life-change of working in the City of London. It was 1996. Researching a part for the Mike Leigh film Career Girls, Serkis spent four months at the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange. Eventually, a trader asked him if he might like to make the situation permanent. “I’d got good enough that it felt almost plausible,” Serkis says. “There was a real theatricality in futures.”
He passed. Finance, he assumes, has changed since then. “Traders were fun to hang out with, but I expect there’s less partying these days. Now the meetings are probably had over mint tea.”
Today Serkis, 58, is in the Corinthia Hotel off Whitehall, a short commute from his north London home. He is bright, engaged and here to publicise Luther: The Fallen Sun, a new Netflix film spun-off from the BBC detective series. Co-starring opposite Idris Elba, here he once more plays a (former) City trader; but one, we soon learn, who has a grim new role as a serial killer.
The part is not the first to ask Serkis to peer into the abyss. (In 2006, he played child murderer Ian Brady in biographical drama Longford.) And a need to dive deep into his characters, Serkis says, can make that process gruelling.
“I did ask myself, ‘Do I really want to go here, at this stage of my life?’ But I also thought, ‘Well, it is my job.’ A function of acting should be investigating the darkest psyche, and then reporting back.”
Does such close attention to evil people make him mistrust them? He beams. “It probably should. But I always trust people until they prove they’re not worth being trusted. I’m still optimistic.”
In Luther, Serkis gives a masterful creepshow, his face contorted into leers and rages. Even his hair unnerves, teased into a ripe bouffant. The fact that the actor has such endlessly pliant features is an irony of his career, turbocharged as it was by a physical vanishing act: Gollum became a groundbreaking example of motion-capture technology.
The actor’s relationship with Tolkien has endured. (He recently voiced 132 characters for a set of Lord of the Rings audiobooks.) Still, he hadn’t heard last week’s news that Warner Bros plan multiple new Tolkien films. “Oh! They do?” He pauses to clarify Peter Jackson’s involvement (so far limited to public support.) “Well, if Peter’s in and he wants me, obviously I’m saying yes.”
Jackson, he says, changed everything. Encouraging him to direct “second unit” footage on The Hobbit gave Serkis another life in filmmaking. He has since directed three movies: Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Breathe, a biopic of disability rights pioneer Robin Cavendish.
The Lord of the Rings also put him in the centre of an explosion of film business interest in motion capture. And the success of the trilogy helped shape the very landscape of modern movies: the realm of juggernaut intellectual properties, storyworlds and franchises. Serkis has starred in most of them. There have been roles for Marvel (as the villainous Ulysses Klaue); DC (Alfred the butler in The Batman) and different parts in The Force Awakens (Supreme Leader Snoke) and acclaimed Star Wars streaming spin-off Andor (prisoner Kino Loy).
“A Marvel shoot is supremely well organised,” Serkis says. “Whereas in the best sense, The Lord of the Rings felt like we were making the world’s biggest indie movie. With streaming, what’s different is the speed. Peter used to say, ‘OK, today we’re starting work on this scene.’ With Andor, you don’t start a scene that isn’t finished two takes later.”
If the industry has changed, so has his outlook. In his early thirties, haunting the Liffe floor for Career Girls, Serkis says he threw everything at a single performance. Now he multitasks. While shooting Luther, he also attended to his own projects, overseen through his company, Imaginarium. (Chief among them is an animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm that he is directing.)
Today, he also has to finish a behind-schedule treatment for another movie, between circling back to Luther. Right on cue, his phone rings. It is Idris Elba. His co-star is live on Radio One; Serkis has agreed to a brief on-air call. For the next 90 seconds, he slips into full, fluent promo mode, before a cheery farewell. “See ya later, Idris! Take care, buddy!”
Serkis was brought up in the west London suburb of Ruislip, and occasionally Baghdad. His mother was a half-Iraqi teacher of disabled children, his father an Iraqi-Armenian gynaecologist. In school holidays, the family often returned to the Middle East. Now he’d like to make a film about the Ibn Sina hospital that his father helped to found in 1960s Baghdad. “It was a free hospital. Then it was taken over by [Saddam Hussein’s] Ba’ath party. Then it ended up in the green zone when the US troops went in.”
By university, he was smitten with theatre. He soon went professional. There were touring companies and stints at the Royal Court. Offstage, he would for a time also join the Socialist Workers Party. On it, he met his future wife, actress Lorraine Ashbourne. The youngest of the couple’s three children is now 18. All are actors.
But if the stage was Serkis’s launch pad, science redefined him. The new technology of motion-capture set loose a singular talent for giving realistic life to — for instance — simian radical Caesar in the rebooted Planet of the Apes. “I’ve been scanned and digitised so many times now,” he says. “I’m on endless servers.” Once the stuff of sci-fi, he says the tech is at a point where he or any actor in history might seamlessly appear in a movie that their flesh and blood self never set foot in.
He frowns. “It’s an urgent issue. Once your performance is captured, it is captured. And actors will need to be remunerated.”
Yet technology is also there to be embraced. His own career proves that. “I tell you what I am excited about,” he says. His eyes light up. “Next-generation storytelling. Cinema where people can collectively be part of a story. Physically within it.” He pitches the film-going of the future, experienced somewhere between the immersive theatre of British company Punchdrunk and the Dalí Cybernetics exhibition now running in London, where holograms and 360-degree projection put the viewer inside a “metaverse” of melted clocks.
“We’re at the absolute beginning. We still need the hardware. But we’ve already started exploring this at the Imaginarium. It’s on our minds.”
Still, there are two sides to Serkis. For a tech-savvy visionary, he is also an old-fashioned film director. If his take on Venom brimmed with effects, what makes him tick behind the camera is more the stuff of Breathe: a human story, rooted in actorly nuance. “I do love being part of something that reaches a huge audience. But what makes my heart sing is usually smaller.” After so many franchises, he also champions standalone stories. “There is a pleasure to being the custodian of a popular series. It’s also never quite your own.”
His mission, he says, is “smuggling films in front of an audience that an algorithm would say they don’t want.” Right now, that means Animal Farm. After more than a decade in development, the film is in production. Serkis meets virtually with Canadian animators four hours a day. “I want to re-tell this great, simple story of innocence and cynicism for a contemporary audience,” he says. “And not make it feel spinachy.”
And yet as a father of Gen-Z children, he must know that many young people are filled with urgent anger about climate change and more. Will they want a story about the futility of revolution?
“I’m aware of the risk. I’d also say what I’ve always taken from Animal Farm is the sense that, even though the revolution fails, maybe you just try again.” He really is an optimist, I say. “I really am!”
‘Luther: The Fallen Sun’ is in cinemas now and on Netflix from March 10
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