I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me.
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

You’re watching your kids playing football, and you’re not present. It’s like the worst… it’s horrible. I despise myself for it. I think it’s a particularly male thing. Being present and in the moment with your kids is something a lot of men struggle with.
Andy Serkis

What you can do with visual effects is enhance the look of the character, but the actual integrity of the emotional performance and the way the character’s facial expressions work, that is what is going to be created on the day with other actors and the director.
Andy Serkis

For me, I’ve never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.
Andy Serkis

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.
Andy Serkis

Playing a character in a video game is different to other performances because your character can’t lead the audience of players in one direction.
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

Gollum’s never really gone too far away from me because he’s indelibly kind of printed into my DNA now, I think.
Andy Serkis

I guess I just tend to feel at home wherever I go.
Andy Serkis

I think my mum wanted me to join the army or something, or become a surveyor – something with good career prospects.
Andy Serkis

Nowadays, there’s no such thing as a stable job.
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

The fact of the matter is I have done so many parts.
Andy Serkis

I do love nature, but I don’t suppose I’d spent more time in zoos as a child than anyone else!
Andy Serkis

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.
Andy Serkis

I think I spend most of my time not living in reality, actually.
Andy Serkis

Actors’ performances do not stand alone in any film, live action or whatever.
Andy Serkis

In performance capture roles, it’s not a committee of animators that author the role, it’s the actor. I think that’s a significant thing for people to understand.
Andy Serkis

Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.
Andy Serkis

I think the actors in ‘Greystoke’ were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who’s, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.
Andy Serkis

The great thing about performance capture is you can go off, and then, without changing costume, you can become another character.
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

A lot of people have asked me to do answer phone messages for them.
Andy Serkis

I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he’s very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.
Andy Serkis

I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein’s descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.
Andy Serkis