Spending time with Andy Serkis can be unnerving. The 45-year-old screen and theatre actor himself is the epitome of kindly decorum. And yet his wide, expressive eyes — round, rheumy and limpid blue — are forever at the mercy of his big screen alter ego, Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Flickers of that ancient balding hobbit repeatedly pass across the features of the London-born Serkis (the latter was digitally morphed into the former for the movies). Thus conversations about his career, his relationship with his Iraqi father or his anti-war protest at the 2003 Oscars reverberate with eerie visual echoes. “We wants it!” whispers the ghost of Gollum, somewhere in the ether. “We needs it! Must have the precious!”
Similarly, a grimace here and curious furrow there, and you spot the formidable primate star of the 2005 blockbuster King Kong living too in that same expansive facial range — the digital Kong was also a bespoke Serkis creation.
Later he will rail against the Luddites who dismiss these computer-enhanced turns, crying: “Wake up! These are acted performances, all driven by my facial muscles!” But for now Serkis, who was once in danger of becoming a pixelated punchline, is relishing the fact that he’s finally taking flesh-and-blood centre stage. Thanks to an incendiary career-defining role in the red-raw musical biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Serkis will soon be recognised, without resorting to hyperbole, as one of the greatest actors of his generation. It has already scooped him a Best Actor nomination at this Sunday’s British Independent Film Awards.
“I think that a lot of things have come together with this role," he says, black-clad and bestubbled, sipping spring water in a discreet London hotel and contemplating the break of a lifetime. “There’s a lot that floats my boat in terms of Ian’s style, Ian’s persona and Ian’s artistic endeavour
And yet the movie never once abandons its emotional heart. At times it is dangerously moving. The wayward Dury, for instance, sits at the bedside of his heartbroken son Baxter (Bill Milner), and attempts a tough-love life lecture. “Don’t be like me, son. Be like you. Remember, we’re all on our own in this life!”
To which the son stares open-eyed at the father and replies the sweetest, softest: “No, Dad. I’m here.”
It is impossible to overstate just how fully Serkis inhabits the role. A self-confessed research nut, he spent three years of pre-production slowly and wholly becoming Dury. He perfected the singer’s baritone stage growl so precisely that he re-recorded a slew of Dury’s hits with the latter’s backing band, the Blockheads. “It’s quite scary,” says Blockhead Chaz Jankel. “He can now mimic Ian with 100 per cent accuracy.”
Physically, too, to capture the extreme gait of the severely disabled Dury, Serkis began walking with a heavy Seventies-era calliper attached to his leg. And he spent six insane months in the gym working out only on the right side of his body, to leave his left side fragile and weak. He admits that though the results onscreen are convincing, the methods have left him in pain. “I’ve got a dodgy back at the best of times, but the weight of that calliper, throwing it about every day, it shoves your body off-centre. And it made this massive weird muscle develop in my groin. I’m still recovering from it all.”
The emotional work was also intense. Dury confidantes far and wide, including his widow Sophie, son Baxter and daughter Jemima were closely consulted on a script that initially seemed, to Serkis and the screenwriter Paul Viragh at least, indecently unforgiving. “We had this early meeting with Jemima and Baxter where we showed them a first draft of the script,” Serkis says. “They both just sighed, shook their heads and eventually said: ‘He was much more of a c*** than that!’ ”
Furthermore, there are subtle biographical bonds between Dury and Serkis that feed the symbiosis of man and myth on-screen. Both men, for example, were art school students who fancied themselves as painters before settling on successful secondary careers — Dury as a singer, Serkis as an actor. Both were outsiders by virtue of their childhoods, Dury because of his disability and Serkis because of his Iraqi background (he suffered schoolyard racism). And both, most tellingly, were profoundly troubled by the painful reality of absentee fathers.
“I always mourn the fact that I never got to know my father, or spent more time with him,” says Serkis, who freely admits that he is “obsessed” by this one defining relationship in his life. He says that his childhood in Ruislip, in Surrey, growing up with his mother and four siblings, was happy but nonetheless marked by the absence of his father, a doctor who had chosen to live and work permanently in Baghdad while remaining married. His father eventually returned to the family home in 1990, on the eve of the first Gulf War, and is now 90. The time for reconciliation, Serkis says, has simply passed. “He’s 90,” he says, haltingly and with a defeated look. “It’s hard, it’s really hard. It’s unfathomable now. It's like, where do you begin? So much has gone on. So much.”
Never a stage brat or a childhood show-off, he found solace in hill-walking and the “isolation of the wilderness”, and chose to study painting at Lancaster University because it was close to the climbable peaks of the Lake District. Acting, he says, was an accident. Forced to chose a subsidiary course during his first year he opted for drama studies but, after playing a wildcard hostage-taker in Barrie Keefe’s play Gotcha, he found himself “addicted to the immersion in character, the psychology, the ability to express what I wanted to express”.
Tutored in the strong tradition of socialist theatre in the Northwest he became a regular fixture at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where he met his future wife, the actress Lorraine Ashbourne, during a production of She Stoops to Conquer. The pair were married in 1991 and have three children: Ruby, 11, Sonny, 9, and Louis, 5. The socialist grooming, he says, was key to his life, his politics and his understanding of acting as a “service” to society. “I’m not just there to be gawped at,” he says. “I’m trying to change things.”
He talks about his desire to “needle” the audience, to provoke it. And certainly, in his best screen roles — from the excitable Potts in Mojo to Ian Brady in Longford to Gollum to Dury — he has an arresting ability to subvert expectations and somehow extract sympathy for the devil. “It’s something in me,” he says. “It might be fighting for the underdog, but I need to challenge an audience’s preconceptions.”
This fighting talk has spread beyond movie sets, too. He famously, on the Oscar night red carpet, three days after the start of the second Gulf War and in front of 33 million US viewers, unfurled a bright red and yellow banner that read: “No War for Oil.”
“It was nerve-wracking,” he says, remembering a night when Hollywood, aside from the lone protesting voice of Michael Moore (“Shame on you, Mr President!”) put its self-preservation ahead of its politics. “It was risky, there was a lot of security around, but America had just invaded Iraq — somebody had to do something. It was my first and possibly my last experience of going to the Oscars.”
On reflection, the London-based Serkis says that his subsequent fears of being ostracised by the Hollywood mainstream were ill-founded. On the contrary, he is currently the darling of the industry’s power elite and will soon be starring as, “the rambunctious, blustery, dipsomaniac Captain Haddock” in Steven Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation, as well as reprising the role of Gollum in the long-awaited two-part adaptation of The Hobbit. Of the latter role, he says that he’s excited to “get back into Gollum mode and revisit him. There’s still so much more to mine.”
For now, though, he is a man still functioning in the shadow of Ian Dury and the Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll experience. He speaks of the project with the punch-drunk love of someone who’s gone deep down for the sake of his art. Widespread recognition is on the way. A Bafta is a dead cert. An Oscar nomination at a push (don’t mention the war!). But none of that matters. What’s important, Serkis says, increasingly impassioned, is being the best father he can be, is planning hill walks with his family and is “finding out who I am through these f***ing characters that I play”.
And right there, in the gritted teeth of frustration, he could be Dury. And probably is. Still flipping back and forth from an impossibly potent character who screams, at the height of his powers: “I’m not here to be remembered! I’m here to be alive!” Either way, Andy Serkis, former big screen special effect, has truly arrived.
'Sex, Drugs, Rock'n'Roll' opens on Jan 8th in the UK
