The one film guaranteed to make Andy Serkis cry
When it comes to motion capture performance in the movie world, no one is more acclaimed than the legendary Andy Serkis. Serkis has played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, King Kong in the 2005 film, Baloo in Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle – which he directed himself – and Caesar in the rebooted Planet of the Apes films between 2011 and 2017. Serkis has simply transcended the limits of his own body.
Serkis has, of course, offered his talents to non-motion capture roles, too. He played British serial killer Ian Brady in 2006’s Longford and pub-rock icon Ian Dury in the 2010 music biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. However, undoubtedly, it is for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings that Serkis is best known.
Like many of us, Serkis sometimes watches movies in order to have a proper release of emotion and a good cry. When once asked which film scene always opens the tear ducts for him, Serkis named Niki Caro’s 2002 drama film Whale Rider, based on the 1987 novel The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera.
Serkis told The Hot Corn: “There’s a scene in The Whale Rider, which is a great film, from New Zealand. 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.”
He continued: “He doesn’t give her any status in the family, in the clan, and she ends up being a really powerful figure; she becomes the Whale Rider. But there’s this scene when she starts to speak, and she just breaks down. It’s amazing, honestly, the most incredible performance. You should check it out.”
The film starred, as Serkis mentions, Keisha Castle-Hughes in the lead role of Kahu Paikea Aprirana, a 12-year-old girl from a Maori tribe in New Zealand. Kahu longs to be the chief of her tribe, but her grandmother is sceptical of such ambition and warns Kahu that the role is usually reserved for male tribe members.
The Whale Rider is not the only film to bring tears to Serkis’ eyes, though. He also claimed that he could not help but weep when listening to the songs from The Sound of Music. “It’s just a totally believable world that has real stakes, and yet it’s set within this musical,” he said. “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.”
