Andy Serkis: ‘Resurrecting dead movie stars will become an industry standard’

“Lift or stairs?” says Andy Serkis, when I bump into him at the door of his production offices in an unimposing block in east London. The actor who has turned “motion capture” roles into high art as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar the chimpanzee in the Planet of the Apes reboot favours the stairs. He’s a passionate mountaineer, who, at 58, still has a bucket list of Himalayan peaks to scale, and he breezes up several flights, as I puff to keep up.

In the past two decades, Serkis has ascended to giddy heights, from jobbing character actor to one of the highest grossing movie stars of all time, with parts in multiple franchises from Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy to the Star Wars sequels to Marvel’s Avengers. In between, he’s become a blockbuster director, and co-founded a cutting-edge production company, The Imaginarium, with multiple projects on the go, from an adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm to a TV series based on the cult horror film The Wicker Man. Oh, and he produced transfixing performances as the singer Ian Dury in the biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, and as Ian Brady in Peter Morgan’s Longford, for which he was Bafta-nominated.

It wouldn’t be hard to imagine Serkis as the drummer of a long-touring heavy metal band: black jeans and T-shirt, muscled, unruly hair still in a fight between black and grey. Yet there’s nothing jaded or seen-it-all-before about him. Volts of energy spark from him, passionate opinions, bursts of voluble enthusiasm in that recognisable deep growl. Serkis is proud of being an employer creating jobs in an ever-changing industry, but he retains an anarchic personal quality that finds its way into The Imaginarium’s edgy, violent Netflix YA drama The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself. “We look for stuff that is just on the edge of respectability,” he says.

Serkis made a successful move into directing with Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and the Spider-Man spin-off Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which grossed more than a half a billion dollars worldwide. Its success opens Hollywood doors for him, but he won’t direct the follow-up, preferring instead Animal Farm, which he has been wanting to make for 12 years. “We’re not going to do a recreation of totalitarianism,” he says of the new adaptation. “We are dealing with what Orwell would be commenting on if he were writing today.”

The film, which will be family-friendly and “humorous”, is likely to use the same hybrid of performance capture with animation as Mowgli. As in the jungle adventure, many of Orwell’s characters are quadrupeds, and although Serkis experimented on that film with actors playing “literally like the front and back ends of pantomime horses”, to be mapped digitally, he admits “it was never going to work… But the actual facial performance of every single animal in Mowgli, the timing and the expression, was driven and authored by the actors.”

Serkis became so enamoured of the technology after his early forays, including the role of King Kong, that he set up the UK’s first studio for performance-capture – which records the body movement, voice and facial expressions of an actor to create a digital character.

When we meet, Serkis has only recently turned up in a surprise role in Disney’s complex, involving Star Wars spin-off Andor, as Kino Loy, a foreman in a futuristic prison workshop, where everyone is barefoot and the floor electrified. The producers had been at pains to use physical sets rather than projected virtual ones. Does he secretly prefer that to the digital technology that helped make his name? “No, it’s about the imagination,” he says. “As a theatre actor, you use your imagination to create the fourth wall and all the space that you inhabit... I don’t draw a distinction.”

Also, he notes, “It’s one of the worst film sets I’ve ever had to work on, because there was nothing organic in there, just metal and plastic... it was horrible, I hated that set.”

It’s hard to avoid talk of acting at home, he admits. Serkis is married to Lorraine Ashbourne – brilliant this year in BBC One’s Sherwood, and a regular in Bridgerton. Their children Ruby, Sonny and Louis have all begun to build up screen appearances. Each has their own approach to the craft, Serkis tells me. He began his career so deeply into method acting that he spent nights sleeping out on the streets to play a homeless drifter at the Royal Court, and he says all of his characters have left their mark. “You go through so many chemical and psychological changes when you’re playing parts that you can never go back to being the person that you were before.”

This great British success story is the son of an Iraqi doctor and a mother with Middle Eastern roots on her mother’s side. “I’ve got so many relatives from there,” he says, “but my mum was like, ‘You are British.’ She was always very proud of it, she thought she’d married a foreigner.” His father was away in Baghdad for much of his childhood, and his mother was at home in west London, with five children, teaching.

He suggests that “very few of us could be really considered entirely British anymore”, adding that “a lot of the roles that I’ve played throughout my life have been about being ‘other’ and being on the outside, you know, marginalised characters”.

I wonder what perspective it gives him on Suella Braverman’s talk of an “invasion of our south coast”. “We’ve had two home secretaries now who have been sort of vehemently anti-immigrant. And I find it quite horrific and disturbing that they can choose to not be the grown-up country that we are... I think it is really despicable behaviour,” he says.

There are many who feel that Serkis should have received an Oscar nomination by now, if not for his Gollum – with the voice he modelled on his cat coughing up a fur ball – then certainly for the hyper-intelligent, warlike Caesar. He’s aware, though, that Hollywood was always going to take a while to catch up with the idea: “It’s no different to playing Ian Dury, in the level of immersiveness into the character...  It does tend to be an older generation that is part of [the awards bodies]. So I think no matter how many times I’ve talked about it, it still would fall on deaf ears. There should be no discrimination between an actor playing a digital role or an on-screen role.”

He thinks it’s only a matter of time before someone gets a nomination, and if it’s Kate Winslet for her role as a blue alien in the upcoming Avatar 2, “that would be a brilliant situation.”

I wonder if he’s been to see the “Abbatars” – the performance-captured versions of Abba that have been performing in east London. No, but he’s dying to, he tells me. There’s talk that the technology will see Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and others back on stage. Serkis would bring back the jazz greats John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Does he think we’ll see James Stewart acting alongside Jennifer Lawrence one day?  “It’s already kind of happening,” he says. “Digital resurrection, I think, is going to become an industry standard.”

This raises an interesting question about the artist as cultural property after their death. Will it matter that John Wayne has been “cancelled” for racist views 40 years after he died? “Absolutely – which leads to a much bigger question, I suppose, about cancel culture. Does art transcend the human that created it? We know countless examples of brilliant pieces of art, film, music, culture, that have been created by people that we no longer think of as good people.

“I still find it difficult not to watch a Woody Allen film, because they’re brilliant movies. It’s very hard to emotionally disconnect from some artworks.” Allegations of child sexual abuse have been made against Allen, which he has strongly denied.

Serkis is not afraid to speak his mind, weighing in on Scarlett Johansson’s decision to step away from a role as a transgender man in 2018, after a backlash, saying that he vehemently disagreed with the criticism of her. “I believe in equal representation,” he tells me. “And what has been happening across the board in terms of people having their own voices heard and stories told, is crucially important. But I also do believe that you as an actor, or a writer or a director, you can offer a perspective on identity, which doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be from that place. The technology that I’ve been so much associated with is a liberating tool that enables you to play anything.”

When Black Panther, in which he plays the supervillain Ulysses Klaue, won a Screen Actors Guild award he recalls having conversation with his co-star Michael B. Jordan. “I asked him, ‘Do you think there’s ever a world where you could play Abraham Lincoln? And I could play Martin Luther King?’ And he said, ‘Andy, don’t screw with my head. I would love to believe that’s true, but it isn’t now.’”

We can expect to see him next year playing the central villain in a film of the BBC One drama Luther. When I quote creator Neil Cross’s line about the drama portraying “monsters who are designed to be frightening”, he gives nothing away about his own character. “His mum loves him,” he grins. Should Luther’s Idris Elba have been Bond? “Oh, 100 per cent,” he says. “But this is so much better than Bond. He doesn’t need to be – I mean, he could and should have been, but he doesn’t need to because Luther is so much more complicated.”

Serkis disagrees with director Danny Boyle’s claim that “I am not sure we [Brits] are great film-makers” – “I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. He’s on a mission to prove it.

The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself is out on Netflix now; Andor is on Disney+