Andy Serkis says there’s no difference playing Ian Dury to portraying Caesar the ape.
The 50-year-old actor portrayed the late British rocker in 2009 film ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ but he insists the conventional process of acting is now no different from performance capture – the method he used when bringing the intelligent chimpanzee to life in the two ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies.
He said: "People think that performance capture is like a genre of acting but I cannot stress enough there is no difference from playing Ian Dury to Caesar, in terms of that they are very similar in many ways! But quite seriously, the process of becoming another person or another being you are putting a large part of yourself under the microscope psychologically and emotionally to an audience. Ian Dury has many personas both performance and personal. It’s just about losing yourself in a character and that’s what we do as actors."
Serkis – who has founded The Imaginarium Studios with film producer Jonathan Cavendish dedicated to the art of performance capture – insists the job of actors to use their imagination to create believable characters and stories and he is always willing to push himself creatively with the roles he accepts.
He explained: "Whether you are standing on stage doing a Shakespeare play imagining the audience isn’t there or you’re stood in front of a green screen imagining San Francisco is collapsing behind you, we live in our imagination. We have this challenge which is a combination of putting chunks or yourself under the microscope and being honest about who you are.
"For me as an actor what drives me is the art of transformation. I just happen to know what does it for me – other actors don’t want to move a centimetre from who they are – what does it for me is when I find characters who are very far away from me to kind of uncover my truth."
Andy Serkis: Playing ape is same as Ian Dury
