‘The Hobbit’ was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the ‘riddles in the dark’ passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years. – Andy Serkis
An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don’t have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer. – Andy Serkis
More and more good actors are now transmigrating into the videogame space and playing roles there because it’s where my generation of kids get stories from. – Andy Serkis
People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that’s me who is acting up there – even if it is behind a mass of pixels – and it’s my voice you hear. – Andy Serkis
Recently I read that half the world or more has read ‘The Lord of The Rings,’ but then I found out that something like 75 per cent of the world knows the ‘Tintin’ books. – Andy Serkis
Games aren’t going to go away. BAFTA’s got a category for games as an art form. The Academy should think about that, too. – Andy Serkis
If ‘The Hobbit’ happens – and there’s reason to believe that it will – then I think I’m in with a chance! Gollum is very much part of ‘The Hobbit,’ after all. – Andy Serkis
Gollum is my picture of Dorian Gray. He will be with me for the rest of life, and I will grow to look more like him as I get older. – Andy Serkis
That’s why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics – all of that. – Andy Serkis
As I started to research gorillas, I began to understand that they’re all totally individual and idiosyncratic, and they have their own personalities. – Andy Serkis
The wonderful thing about 48 fps is the integration of live action and CG elements; that is something I learned from ‘The Hobbit.’ We are so used to 24 fps and the romance of celluloid… but at 48 fps, you cannot deny the existence of these CG creations in the same time frame and space and environment as the live action. – Andy Serkis
If you are not moved by the character, no amount of CGI will give you a performance that is emotionally engaging or devastating – what a live-action performance does. – Andy Serkis
A lot of actors on film sets… very often they’re not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I’ve always had that awareness and that’s something that I’ve wanted to bring in to go beyond acting… As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked. – Andy Serkis
I can get on with all different sorts of people, and I never feel homesick, particularly, or I’ve never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country. – Andy Serkis
When you do animation – well, straightforward animation, although it’s not straightforward – the voice for a character or something, they’re always singular experiences, really. – Andy Serkis
Gollum is Gollum – though in ‘Lord of the Rings’ he’s 600 years old and in ‘The Hobbit’ he’s 540, so he looks a little bit more handsome. – Andy Serkis
There are parts of New Zealand that I absolutely fell in love with that I will miss going back to, but I kind of think that is the part that can continue and will continue on. I don’t imagine I’ll stop going back to New Zealand, because I feel part of the fabric there, really. – Andy Serkis
Actors’ performances in films are enhanced in a million different ways, down to the choice of camera shot by the director – whether it’s in slow motion or whether it’s quick cut – or… the choice of music behind the close-up or the costume that you’re wearing or the makeup. – Andy Serkis
Be magnificent. Life’s short. Get out there. You can do it. Everyone can do it. Everyone. – 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
Originally when I went off to work on ‘The Lord of The Rings’ I got a call from my agent saying that I was just going to do a voice. But I couldn’t really approach it like that. To get Gollum’s voice I had to play the character. – Andy Serkis
It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own. – Andy Serkis
You can’t just come up with an idea for a game and stick the drama on top. It all has to be one driving thrust. – Andy Serkis
I’ve done a lot of films that are purely live-action roles, and even if I hadn’t come across performance capture as a technology, I think I’d always consider myself a sort of mercurial actor. – Andy Serkis
After ‘Kong,’ my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character… You are telling your body that you are these things and that you’re feeling these thoughts and that you’re experiencing these experiences. – Andy Serkis