“He was obnoxious”: the 1970s musician Andy Serkis summed up as “just an arse”
You would imagine Andy Serkis isn’t a guy you’d particularly want to upset; after all, anyone who can so effortlessly transform into a snarling, creepy little ring-obsessed hobbit or a battle-happy killer primate in Planet of the Apes has probably got a bit of a temper.
But Serkis has had such a long and varied career, encountering all kinds of entertainers from all walks of life, that he was bound to come across someone who got his back up now and then. We’ll come to that later, but it’s worth a reminder of how remarkable and yet little-mentioned Serkis’ body of work remains.
An actor by trade, he spent most of the 1990s in and out of various British TV shows and the occasional low-budget film, while, importantly, doing voice work in radio dramas that allowed him to get behind several different characters without the aid of pictures. But he did indeed have a fearsome temper, and he was a young man who raged at the political injustices of the world, ending up selling copies of the Socialist Worker newspaper on the streets of London.
It may well have been that anger, that saw him have to be held down during rage-filled episodes by his three sisters as a kid, that he channelled when he auditioned for Peter Jackson, who was putting together the cast for what would be one of the most important cinematic trilogies of all time, The Lord of the Rings.
Serkis did no less than completely change the art of acting with motion capture overnight with his work as Gollum, crawling and contorting his body and voice while CGI animators worked to convincingly bring his performance to the big screen on an enormous scale. Although he based the voice he used on something as inconspicuous as his own cat coughing up a fur ball, there was nothing minor about the response to what he did in the movies once they were released.
He won a host of industry awards and nominations for the three films, which brought in $3billion in revenue and won 17 Oscars between 2001 and 2003. And it led to Serkis being seen as the pinnacle of voice and motion capture acting in Hollywood for several years, as he won similar acclaim for 2006’s King Kong and, further down the line, for his role as Caesar in three of the big budget Planet of the Apes reboots, the first of which was released in 2011 and made almost half a billion dollars at the box office.
But Serkis, aware that people were starting to wonder what he actually looked like, was more than able to act without the use of computers, and proved it on several occasions in the 2000s, notably with a Golden Globe nomination for the dark 2006 drama Longford, about the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, and then in 2010 for Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.
That was the British-made film about Ian Dury, the singer and songwriter who rose to fame in the 1970s with his band The Blockheads, with stand-out tracks including the movie title song, ‘What a Waste’ and ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. Serkis played the lead role of Dury in the biopic, but despite the rocker having been something of a hero growing up, meeting him for the film proved desperately disappointing.
Serkis recalled his encounter with Dury to The Guardian, saying, “He was obnoxious. We were in a Chinese restaurant, and he slagged everybody off and was just an arse, you know. And that same night, Mickey Gallagher, who was one of the Blockheads but was caring for him, just went, ‘Fuck this, I’m not doing it any more’, and he left Ian on the pavement outside the hotel.”
Dury was certainly something of a divisive and colourful character. He lived with polio from childhood and could be incredibly cruel to those around him, even his own son Baxter, who would go on to be a recording artist, accused him of ‘mental violence’. He is recognised as one of the UK’s great lyricists, however, and several leading music stars attended his funeral after he died at just 57.
But Serkis, despite the restaurant experience, wasn’t put off and was determined to bring truth to his portrayal of Dury. He added, “I knew we weren’t going to be painting a glorified picture of a stoic underdog; it was going to be warts and all. And when we started showing early drafts to Sophie [Dury’s wife] and Baxter, they were like, ‘He’s so much darker, so much more of a cunt than this. You’ve got to get down and dirty with this’. So we thought, ‘Great’, if they’re prepared to take off the boxing gloves, so will we.”
