🐷 Exclusive: Andy Serkis Talks Animal Farm, Gollum, & More

REEL THOUGHTS

Andy Serkis Determined to Bring Back Classic LOTR Magic in New Gollum Movie (Exclusive)

It’s become cliché in modern pop culture discourse to lament they couldn’t make The Lord of the Rings today like they did at the turn of the century. When Peter Jackson came down from the proverbial Mountains of Moria, he and an army of craftspeople brought with them a set of movies that combined a century’s worth of classical filmmaking techniques with what now looks like the early pioneer days of digital effects.

But the most intrepid of these CG-explorers, Andy Serkis, does not agree with the sentiment that those days can never come again. And when I caught up with him on New York’s Upper East Side for a lunch of grilled octopus and brussel sprouts, he was adamant that Middle-earth’s halcyon era is about to return as he gears up to take on the director’s chair in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.

"I absolutely think you can make them like that because we are doing it,” Serkis says. “All the same people who worked on the original movies have come back to the set department; the set designers; we’re using miniatures; we’re employing some of the older techniques and bringing some of the new techniques to bear as well. So we will be walking the tightrope of creating a world that people are familiar with, but also it’s an entirely new story.”

The placement of that story is indeed one of the most intriguing things about Gollum. Originally expected by fans to take place in the hazy gap in Fellowship of the Ring between Ian McKellen’s Gandalf the Grey discovering the Baggins’ curious ring and his return with foreboding news of its power—which on the page actually spans 17 years!—reports have since suggested The Hunt for Gollum is a full-fledged prequel set entirely before the events of the original trilogy. This is a development which Serkis seems to confirm.

“I’m very excited, and not just it being a nostalgia trip. There’s actually a lot to explore with the character of Gollum,” Serkis continues. “We are using more prosthetics for the orcs, for instance and shooting all on location. This film sits between the world of the Hobbit trilogy and the original trilogy, so within the law and canon, it sits perfectly in there, but technically, visually, and stylistically, it wants to merge those two [trilogies].”

The character of Gollum is a profound one for Serkis, who acknowledges the poor wretch is never far from the surface of his subconscious. Still, he refrains from reprising the character in his personal life, making only special occasions for some fans, particularly those with stories about finding unlikely hope from this admittedly “deeply malevolent character.” Like Serkis, they see Gollum as a metaphor for surviving addiction.

To this day though, Serkis is grateful for Gollum, as well as aware of the irony in that since he initially resisted the role in 1999, thinking it was “just” a vocal performance. In fact, when the chance to even audition for the part was initially broached, Serkis told his agent “there must be a load of decent roles in that film that I could play proper characters, not just do a voice.”

Peter Jackson and his writing partner and wife, Fran Walsh, obviously convinced Serkis of the immense complexity that was there—and the opportunity presented by motion-capture performance. The rest as they say was history, including the awkward pioneer bits of being one of the first guys filming on-location in a mo-cap suit.

“I’ll never forget the first day of shooting Lord of the Rings, and turning up in front of a crew of 250 rough, tough Kiwis on top of a mountain and standing in little more than a lycra speed-skating suit,” Serkis recalls with a wry chuckle. “You have to be quite fearless to wander around in a gimp suit.”

It became the experience that led to him creating a character he thinks of like a son—and now in a movie where he will get to be the father.

“We’ll find out if that son gets out of control,” Serkis muses. “Tell him, I might have to discipline him.”

The director also leaves us with one last tease about another character returning in The Search for Gollum: the man who would be king, Aragorn. Initially played by Viggo Mortensen, the heir to the throne has been recast with the younger Jamie Dornan. With that said, he might come across as quite different from how viewers remember, as signaled in the casting announcement where Dornan is credited simply as “Strider.”

“That’s where he is at this particular part of the journey,” says Serkis. “He wouldn’t think of himself as Aragorn, son of Arathon, at this part of the journey. He’s living in the wilderness. He’s a doomed lone ranger.”

Check out our full profile of Serkis for more about the actor’s career, his passions, and his inspirations, from King Kong to Animal Farm.

ABSOLUTE NEWS

Can The Devil Wears Prada 2 Rewrite the Summer Box Office Playbook?

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is opening this weekend. That’s not news, but its $60-$75 million opening forecasts from box office prognosticators definitely are. Historically the first weekend of May has been dominated by studio spectacles intended to wow audiences with action and effects—two-thirds of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, every Avengers flick, last year’s Thunderbolts*—so it probably says something about the direction of the industry when a 20-year-later throwback to the ultimate fashionista mean-girl movie could possibly beat some of the superhero openers of last year… (Yeah, I’m taking the over.)

ABSOLUTE RECOMMENDS

Hokum: Come for the Irish Flavor; Stay for the Old-School Horror

Another movie opening this weekend is Damian McCarthy’s far quieter and eerily effective Hokum. An old school morality tale set and filmed in McCarthy’s Irish homeland, the horror movie stars Adam Scott as the meanest drunk novelist this side of Jack Torrance who gets more than he bargained for in a hotel said to be keeping a witch locked up in its bridal suite. Think of it like a ghost story they would’ve told by a roaring Yuletide fire 200 years ago.

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