Andy Serkis names his biggest “guilty pleasure” movie
There’s certainly a unique talent in the very voice of English acting legend Andy Serkis, seeing as he’s primarily known for his motion capture and voice work for a series of computer-generated characters. Most notably, Serkis has voiced the iconic Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
But his motion-capture achievements do not end with his famous Tolkien character; he’s also portrayed King Kong in the 2005 film starring Jack Black and Adrien Brody, Baloo in Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, which he also directed and Supreme Leader Snoke in the Star Wars movies The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.
Simply, Serkis has starred in several cinema fans’ favourite films of all time, and in an interview with The Hot Corn, the actor named his personal top film choices. In doing so, Serkis drew attention to his “guilty pleasure”, the 1965 movie The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood and a swathe of other notable singing stars.
“The Sound of Music,” Serkis noted. “It’s just a totally believable world that has real stakes, and yet it’s set within this musical. Every single time I listen to the songs, they just always make me cry. It is very much linked to childhood, and that’s another movie that really blew my mind when I was a kid.”
The film serves as a screen adaptation of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1959 stage musical and tells the real story of Maria von Trapp based on her 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which details her life as a governess to seven children, her marriage to their father and their escape from the Austrian annexation of 1938.
Clearly, Serkis loves a good cry when he watches his favourite films as another of his selections, 2002 Whale Rider, also induces his tears. “It’s when the young girl Keisha Castle-Hughes is going to perform in a school hall, and she’s expecting her grandfather to turn up, and he doesn’t show any emotion towards her or accept her because she’s not a boy basically,” the actor noted, “he doesn’t give her any status in the family, in the clan.”
Serkis is also not the only notable star to express their love for The Sound of Music, as even Arnold Schwarzenegger has previously spoken of his soft spot for the classic musical. Arnie once told Rotten Tomatoes, “It’s another one of the movies that I just think the world of. Very, very entertaining. Because, you know, it’s Austria: the music, the look of it. I think it was really a movie that was a very interesting story, but it sold my homeland visually in such a spectacular way.”
