Toronto Comicon 2023 Andy Serkis Q&A
Photo Credit: Kyle Youldon

Toronto Comicon 2023 hosted Andy Serkis as the guest of honor, which was an impressive addition to the event. Serkis is best known as Gollum/Smeagol in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and as Caesar in the newest Planet of the Apes trilogy. More recently, he was the body and voice behind Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Kino Loy in Andor on Disney+.

Here are some interesting tidbits from Andy Serkis’ Q&A at Toronto Comicon 2023.

One of the more contemporary topics Serkis touched upon was his thoughts on the use of AI with art in today’s age, the stigma behind it, and whether or not he thinks it’ll affect or harm his job as an actor. Serkis explains, “It’s interesting because a lot of people are getting worried about that (AI), but then people were terrified about performance capture. You know, when I first started working in performance capture, most actors didn’t understand what that was. They were like, ‘Our jobs are going to be taken by robots.’ There was a real fear of this new technology. But it’s only enabled actors to play so many different things.”

Serkis continued, “So, with the evolution of the internet, 25 years ago, we had no internet, and now look at what the world is and how it’s changed, how we communicate, and how brilliant things have evolved from the internet. And awful things have evolved from the internet. Technology is only what it is in the hands of the users, and so if you use AI in a creative, intelligent, really brilliant way of being able to tell stories that will move people, not just maybe in 2D but in 3D, and be present and immersed in a story then bring it on. But equally, there’s deep fake. There are ways of misusing it and especially in the sort of post-truth world that we live in. There’s a lot of the technology that’s being involved that can be used for nefarious reasons.”

Andy Serkis in Luther The Fallen Sun
Netflix

Staying on that topic, he brought up the character he played in Luther: The Fallen Sun, David Robey, who is a tech whiz, and how that character’s narrative also fits into the conversation. Serkis told the audience, “He’s a tech whiz, really the whole thing about the character that I play is, here’s someone who fully understands the capability of using technology in a really, really manipulative and controlling way, and he’s able to use all the Alexas that are in your houses, all of the microphones that are in your laptops and the cameras that are inside your laptops to watch you all the time and then shame you.”

Serkis went into why the Luther character appealed to him, saying, “That’s why I took that role. It’s a very dark and pretty nasty character. I nearly didn’t take it, and I thought, god, do I really want to play this guy? But I thought the debate was very interesting about how technology can be used for good things and for horrendous things, the dark web, and all the ways the dark web operates to manipulate people.”

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Circling back to AI and how it shapes the entertainment industry, the actor explained, “All of these things — photogrammetry and what I’ve always adored about performance capture — it is sort of the end of the age of typecasting in terms of any actor can play anything. I went from playing Smeagol and Gollum to this 25-foot gorilla in the next film. It means that no matter the color of your skin, what height you are, or what sex you are, if you’ve got the ability to empathize and climb into the skin of that character, you can absolutely play anything. I think it’s a really interesting technology.”

During the panel, Serkis talked about his new comic book based on Greek mythology called Eternus, hitting comic book stores in July. Eternus follows the story of a 9-year-old blind priestess who witnesses the brutal murder of Zeus and Heracles, who must protect her long enough for her to identify the killer and bring justice.

Andy Serkis Comic ETERNUS
Scout Comics

Talking about the project, Serkis said, “I was very, very fortunate to work with some incredibly talented graphic novelists and story artists. These are the Greek myths reimagined as graphic novels, and they feel very contemporary. They feel very current, and they’re very beautifully drawn…I met up with a producer called Andrew Levitas, an artist, and we talked together about creating a series of graphic novels which are based on Greek myths and don’t feel old and sort of unconnected to the modern world. They’re very, very modern in their storytelling and what they’re saying about humanity.”

Back in 2011, the Animal Farm film adaptation based on the George Orwell story was announced, with Andy Serkis originally slated as a screenwriter. During its production, he took over directorial duties. Currently, distribution rights are held by Netflix. Within the film’s long-storied history, the medium for the film changed multiple times, finally sticking with computer animation.

During his panel, Serkis discussed his vision of the film and its more modern take on the classic, explaining, “We’ve been trying to make Animal Farm since 2011. It was during the time of the first Apes movie, and I loved Animal Farm as a book. In fact, I was talking to someone about it earlier today, the first books I read as a young adult were The Hobbit and Animal Farm. Those are my first two books, and, of course, I now spent a huge chunk of my life with The Hobbit, and the same was to be with Animal Farm. It’s the most beautiful, and George Orwell describes it as a fairy tale, but it’s an allegory for corruption, absolute power corrupting absolutely, and post-Russian revolution Stalinism and totalitarian Russia.”

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Serkis went into detail about his version of the story, saying, “We worked with the Orwell estate very closely. If Orwell were writing Animal Farm today, what would he be satirizing? What would the fairytale be a cloak for? So it’s very, very contemporaneous. It also has a lot of humor in it, and it also has a particular point of view. Anybody who’s read the book will know that it tells the story, from afar, of the animals rebelling against humans, creating a new world, a new order, a utopia where they all work together equally. Then through the bad leadership of the pigs, the pigs then ascend to become a kind of ruling class, and the rest of the animals are in a worse off position than they were underneath the rule of human beings. So it’s like, how do you make that?”

Animal Farm Cover
Penguin

He continued, “Look around the world at what’s happening, and you can see how eternally relevant that book is still. But the ways of telling and the language of telling that story have changed, and the targets, the characters, that are being satirized are not Stalin and Trotsky and Lenin and all of those people. They are, I’m not going to say who, but you don’t have to look too far to realize if you dig into it. But it feels very, very modern.”

During the panel, Serkis went in-depth on how he and his fellow Planet of the Apes actors all developed the voice that Caesar and the Apes would use in the films and how it evolved throughout the trilogy, saying, “With Caesar, we see a huge trajectory throughout the course of three movies. He begins with no voice, and the first word he says is ‘No!’ and that is like quite late on in the movie. That was significant. It wasn’t a fully formed, expressed human expression of the word ‘No,’ it was a guttural animal, kind of primal kind of scream of ‘No’ at the injustice that was going on in the ape sanctuary.”

“Then, over the course of the two movies, Dawn and then War, you saw this gradual progression, and we worked really hard, all of us. We all worked very, very hard on the evolution of the voice and how that would change and what it is, how the bone structure would change in your throats, or how your physicality as you’re becoming more upright and more human-like, how that would affect the voice. Also, the construction of the sentences went from being, you know, *imitates guttural Caesar noises* primal sort of sounds to ‘words… that… came… out… of… breath’ (again imitating Caesar). So it was a gradual progression, and we found that, for instance, you couldn’t really use words with lots of syllables. So you wouldn’t say, ‘I’m going to be communicating with you’ (another Caesar impression). It wouldn’t work. It had to be ‘I speak,’ so it’s like we found a language for them as that evolved.”

Andy Serkis in War for the Planet of the Apes
20th Century Fox

During the fan questions, someone asked Andy Serkis if he’d prefer to play villains or good guys for the rest of his career. Serkis went into the concept of good and evil and whether any of his characters are actually inherently evil, replying, “Well, you see, it’s a difficult one because I don’t really see the world like that. I don’t really see the world in terms of good and evil. I actually don’t see it like that. It’s far more complicated, and that’s, I suppose, the point of taking those characters on. I think we are all who we are for various reasons, whether it’s genetic, whether it’s behavioral, whether it’s nature or nurture. However you want to put it. We are the sum total of good or bad parenting or being abandoned or being overly looked after.”

He continues, “So the characters that I play don’t ever have a kind of ‘this is an evil character and or a villain’ or ‘this is a very good person.’ I think nearly every role I’ve played has been in that murky gray area. It’s about presenting that to an audience for them to then have their own debate about it. That’s the point as an actor. I really believe that my job is to instill a questioning and a debate and something for you, the audience, to go away with, which then makes you think further about it…Then you shut down any possibility of change or a change in viewpoint or trying to understand it.”

“I’ll give you an interesting example, did anybody see that show about Jeffrey Dahmer? I know people who refuse to watch it outright. Some people came away from it being incredibly moved by it. Some people were furious about it and thought it was glorifying a serial killer. Personally, I thought it did exactly what I’m talking about, which is it opens up a big question. There was a point in history when the police were homophobic and racist and allowed this serial killer to get away with so much. Now, that was part of the discussion of the series. I sat and watched it with my wife, and we were riveted by the personal relationships in it. The relationship with Jeffrey Dahmer and his dad and, look, we’re all parents to our children. And if your child happens to be a serial killer, how do you deal with that? They’re still your child. What do you do? Just completely cut them off? Would you try and understand them? Those kinds of questions are really the questions that I ask when I’m playing all of the different ranges of characters that I get involved with.”

You can check out more of our Toronto Comicon 2023 coverage here!

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