Читать книгу Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask - Justin Lewis - Страница 12

In the autumn of 1988, 24-year-old Andy Serkis was at York’s Theatre Royal, appearing as Bill Sikes in Oliver! – Lionel Bart’s musical reworking of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist – when he landed an early television break. Then entering its second series, The New Statesman was a Sunday evening sitcom vehicle for Rik Mayall as the bumptious and amoral MP, Alan B’Stard, and was one of ITV’s biggest comedy hits of the time. Serkis would appear in two consecutive episodes – as a newspaper reporter for the now-defunct national title Today – where other guest stars included Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. However, it was not a high-profile screen debut for him: he is almost unrecognisable underneath a wig and spectacles; he only delivers feedlines for B’Stard; and his aggregated time onscreen over the two episodes lasts barely one minute.

Serkis’s New Statesman episodes were recorded at Yorkshire Television in Leeds and broadcast on 29 January and 5 February 1989. That year would also see him make minor showings in a couple of peak-time TV drama productions. Transmitted in June, Made in Spain was a feature-length drama based on a stage play by Tony Grounds about the wives of four conmen who have to leave Britain urgently for Spain. Saracen, meanwhile, which went out from September, was a new Saturday night series from the makers of Inspector Morse about counterterrorism and centred on a duo of SAS troubleshooters. It was in a series aimed at younger viewers, though, where Serkis would initially make his mark on television.

In April and May 1989, he was a regular supporting player in a new six-part BBC1 comedy for Saturday teatimes. Taped in Manchester, Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors had been spun off from the brief but startling success of the comic pop group Morris Minor and the Majors. Fronted by the songwriter and comic Tony Hawks – later to write best-selling books such as Round Ireland with a Fridge and One Hit Wonderland – the trio’s Beastie Boys parody ‘Stutter Rap’ had been a top-five hit in the UK in 1988, and had gone on to top the charts in Australia. But follow-up singles, such as the pastiche of manufactured pop ‘This is the Chorus’, had not been successful.

Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors, which blended sitcom and songs, found Hawks’s lead character Morris Minor attempting to juxtapose being a ‘top pop star’ with running a garage. Serkis played a mechanic called Sparky Plugg. The series was one of the first comedy shows broadcast by the BBC to have been made by an independent production company, namely Noel Gay Television (makers of Red Dwarf), but it did not catch fire with critics or viewers and was not recommissioned for a second series. However, it was entered for the Golden Rose of Montreux that summer in the Independents category alongside the aforementioned Red Dwarf and Emma Thompson’s queasily received solo series, Thompson.

The ITV children’s drama series Streetwise, about a team of bicycle couriers, would show greater staying power. It would run for three series and a total of 27 episodes between September 1989 and June 1992, by far the largest body of TV work of Serkis’s entire career. It also starred Stephen McGann (brother of Paul), Sara Sugarman (later to become a film director) and Paterson Joseph, who many years later would share a stage with Serkis and Ashbourne – in Othello in Manchester. On the writing team would be Matthew Graham, future creator of Life on Mars.

Serkis played the environmentally aware Owen in Streetwise, and as was already becoming typical, was conducting his own background research into what the part would entail. In this case, it meant working for a despatch company for a few days. ‘I did it to get the feel of the grittiness and the pressure,’ he told teenage magazine Look-In. ‘Breathing car fumes for eight hours a day, and nipping in and out of traffic, calls for a certain type of person. The grime’s bad. You get home at night and your body is just covered in black soot and grease.’ Location filming on the streets of London could be hazardous. There was one near miss for Serkis when his mountain bike inexplicably jammed on Marylebone Road, and sent him sprawling under a car, which – fortunately for him – was stationary at traffic lights.

Serkis’s extensive experience in theatrical work, and his principles over how one interacts with fellow performers and the audience, has fed strongly into his output for television, and later cinema. He believed that there was a major difference between actors who had learnt their craft predominantly through the theatre and those who had largely concentrated on screen projects. There is, of course, the argument that one doesn’t have to be so word perfect or pitch perfect on screen because of multiple takes and the safety net of editing. However, there is no cutting room floor for outtakes in the theatre.

But for Serkis there was a far more fundamental reason why stage actors could make more of an impression on celluloid or via the cathode-ray tube. ‘I think people who have worked on stage just convey – they push through beyond the camera,’ he said in 2003. ‘Even if they’re standing behind it, they’ll work their socks off, acting with you. You work with people who are just really more interested in acting to the corner of the matte box, because their eye line’s better at the camera, and then you work with people who play the scenes with you properly. For me, it’s really what happens between people that’s interesting.’

For people to address the camera angle rather than the other actors is to miss the point of acting, Serkis believed. ‘It’s going to make the shot look ridiculous if they’re not. You know when an actor is giving their 100 per cent, because you’ve given your 100 per cent to them, and you know when people are just kind of coasting it because they’ve done their shot. Theatre actors are used to giving that amount of reciprocal energy on stage.’

That said, Serkis has emphasised his enthusiasm for television and film shoots, which demand a shorter, more heightened sort of concentration than the type required for stage performances. ‘There is an enormous amount of satisfaction of working off instinct and the moment as well, rather than the long run of a play.’ And so, from 1989 onwards, Andy Serkis found himself moving effortlessly from stage to screen and back again, using different skills and stretching different acting muscles with every job.

Bar serials, the last television series to feature Andy Serkis as a prominent cast member was Finney, a series broadcast by ITV in the autumn of 1994. A six-part thriller made by Zenith (already showered with plaudits for Inspector Morse and the gritty children’s serial Byker Grove), Finney’s origins lay in the cinema. It had begun life as the film Stormy Monday seven years earlier, in which Sting had starred as the owner of a jazz club in Newcastle, who also had one foot in the city’s criminal underworld. Stormy Monday’s producer, Nigel Stafford-Clark, had the bright idea to imagine the lead character’s past exploits, but to set the story in the present day.

Steven Finney (David Morrissey, who learnt to play the double bass especially for the part) turns his back on his family’s criminal reputation in favour of pursuing his musical career down in London, but he is compelled to return to Newcastle on learning that his father has been murdered. Now he ploughs his energy into trying to protect the family empire from being snatched by the rival clan the Simpsons. Then it is discovered that Finney Senior has left all his worldly goods to Steven’s sister Lena (Melanie Hill), which sends the shunned and vulnerable younger sibling Tom (Serkis) into a downward and resentful spiral of gambling and self-destruction. Even as his elder brother offers support, Tom takes increasingly desperate action, and finally all is revealed in a shocking twist.

An elaborate study of family loyalties, Finney had the misfortune to be scheduled opposite the BBC’s Crocodile Shoes starring Jimmy Nail – another drama with a Newcastle flavour (even though Finney had in fact mostly been filmed in Glasgow). But it was well received on the whole: critics praised the series for its sharp dialogue and ability to produce something fresh from a genre that all too often takes refuge in the clichéd rather than in the surprising. As Tom, Serkis had been given his meatiest TV role so far, and he was grateful to the writer and director David Hayman, with whom he would work again in 1995 on the film The Near Room. ‘I’ve always been inspired by him as an actor and director and a human being,’ he said many years later of Hayman. ‘He is a real guiding light.’

Despite the warm reception given to Finney, Serkis’s forte on television from now on, anticipating the impact he would later make on celluloid, seemed to be in the mini-series. The characters he would portray were often so intense that they would soon have to be watered down if shoehorned into a regular serial or long-running series, which may be why we have never seen him in a soap like EastEnders or Coronation Street.

Eventually, Serkis would darken a pair of serialisations of Charles Dickens novels (novels that, fittingly, originally appeared in episodic form in the nineteenth century). Oliver Twist, written when Dickens was only in his mid-twenties, was boldly adapted for ITV in 1999 (as four one-hour instalments) by Alan Bleasdale. Liverpool-born Bleasdale, one of the most original television writers of the 1980s and 1990s, had developed his own brand of award-winning contemporary serial drama such as The Monocled Mutineer, G.B.H. and Jake’s Progress. Bleasdale’s interpretation of Twist would be radical, not even introducing Oliver until the serial’s second hour, but examining the boy’s family background first.

Serkis would play the same part he had portrayed in York’s Theatre Royal in 1988: Bill Sikes. Sikes is a terrifying, menacing presence, a thief and housebreaker who can be violent, to the point of viciously murdering his lover Nancy (Emily Woof) when he believes that she has betrayed him. Nancy has been a force for good in an intimidating society, and takes young Oliver under her wing when he enters the shady world of criminality. ‘Everyone is frightened of Bill Sikes,’ said Bleasdale, ‘and I wanted to hold on to that presence. He is undeniably brutal, but it’s the manner in which the society was.’ And the writer believed that he had a few redeeming features. After one robbery, for which Oliver is in attendance, Sikes rescues the boy. ‘Sikes could have left Oliver for dead, but he picks him up and runs with him as far as he can. It’s not me that’s written that: it’s Dickens.’

In 2008, Serkis played another Dickens bad guy – the charming but cold and calculating French opportunist Rigaud – in Andrew Davies’s reworking for the BBC of Little Dorrit, and thoroughly enjoyed discovering his murky depths. ‘He’s full of contradictory qualities,’ Serkis told the BBC. ‘Yes, he’s a murderer, a blackmailer and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. At the same time, he is also very attractive and has a thing for the ladies. He’s an upwardly mobile underdog.’

Little Dorrit, like almost any Dickens adaptation, would have a vast repertory company. It would co-star, among many others, Freema Agyeman, fresh out of Doctor Who, Ruth Jones (co-writer and co-star of the comedy series Gavin and Stacey), Mackenzie Crook (Gareth in The Office), Amanda Redman (Waterloo Road, New Tricks) and Eve Myles (Torchwood). There was a great sense of team spirit on the production, Serkis felt. ‘It’s like being back in a theatre company. Everyone comes in on different days, so you never know who’s going to be in the trailer next to you.’ But Little Dorrit had rarely been adapted for TV. Andrew Davies had a theory as to why this should be. ‘Commissioners tend to go for the usual suspects with Dickens…Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations…’ he said. ‘But this is a tremendous opportunity to take a novel that not many people have read and introduce it to them.’

For Davies, it was important that Dickens’s literature should be inclusive to all strata of society, ‘from aristocrats to beggars to militaristic villains, and manages to intertwine their lives with each other’. So how would he sum up Rigaud? ‘He’s a big character, very dark but also quite dynamic,’ he commented, but the larger-than-life stature and intimidating presence of Rigaud was at odds with Serkis’s slight build and average height of 5 feet 8 inches.

This caused difficulties when Serkis had to play a scene in which Rigaud bullies Matthew Macfadyen’s character of Arthur. Macfadyen, at six foot three, towered over Serkis, who was sporting a rakish earring and false nose. ‘I have to be quite threatening to him and it just looked ridiculous,’ said Serkis. ‘No matter what the acting was like, you just couldn’t get around the sheer difference in size. We had to make him sit. He had to sort of stumble back into a chair.’ The only other way to beef up Rigaud was to puff up his costume. ‘He kind of invades the space when he arrives in a room.’ Once again, Serkis’s skills for climbing were put to the test. ‘My character gets to break into a house,’ he told Time Out. ‘I’ve actually soloed up the Matterhorn, so I loved the climb. I fell two storeys on set, but I landed on my feet.’

Facing potential critical gripes head on, Andrew Davies was aware that some would find Rigaud’s wild-eyed beastliness to be a little too overpowering. ‘His first words are “Sacre bleu!”’ he laughed, ‘But I thought, Why not?’ He also knew that Dickens purists would question the extent to which he had strayed from the text, a common accusation with his adaptations. Some of the new ideas were in fact Serkis brainwaves. ‘He kept suggesting extra bits of business for himself, like the tiny subplot in which he seduces a French landlady. That didn’t appear in the original script.’ The Scotsman paid tribute to Serkis’s flamboyant portrayal. ‘With eyes like a snake and a (false) beak-like nose, Serkis twitches his head around in a way that shows you Rigaud’s sneaky brain at work.’

With the series being screened in twice-weekly half-hour chunks, Dorrit was like a period-drama equivalent of a TV soap. ‘Little Dorrit lends itself very well to this format,’ believed Andrew Davies. ‘You can cram an incredible number of people and incidents into a half-hour without viewers feeling they’re just being given snippets.’ There were also unexpectedly timely aspects to the story: as well as featuring a murder mystery and a love story (both constants in storytelling), it concerns a loss of finances for the characters. ‘We’ve been rather lucky with that one,’ murmured Davies. Production had begun on Dorrit before the world-changing economic downturn, which started to be reported in September 2008, mere weeks before the series began on television.

Serkis’s earliest foray into the mini-series genre, though, came nearly 15 years before Dorrit. Grushko, starring Brian Cox, was a three-hour drama made by the BBC in association with German and Russian television, and was filmed on location in St Petersburg during the summer of 1993. It was adapted from the novel Dead Meat by Philip Kerr, a first-person account of a Russian detective’s quest to nail the truth behind a journalist’s murder. Dead Meat was itself based on the work of Inspector Gorbachevski, a serving chief of detectives who was working for the city’s Investigating Bureau – a specialist unit that was seeking to stamp out organised crime. Gorbachevski’s files of crime were eye-opening indeed, and it became clear that a huge pool of crime stories in Russia, hitherto hidden from the eyes and ears of the West, were now accessible.

The 12-week shoot on the series took place with the full support of the city’s state police, but there were bigger problems with the series title. The BBC was reportedly unhappy with ‘Dead Meat’, then (over the following months) with ‘Russian Roulette’, with ‘Poisoned Chalice’, and with ‘Dead Liberty’. Even when the title Grushko seemed to cause the least worry for the corporation, the drama’s teething troubles weren’t over. It was originally scheduled for Sunday nights, traditionally the strongest night for drama on television, but, after a few high-profile series had unexpectedly underperformed, jittery bosses moved it to a less exposed slot on Thursdays.

Philip Kerr recalled visiting the Youssupov Palace with Serkis and described him as a ‘great sax player and an even better actor’. Serkis himself played Pyotr, described in write-ups as a ‘Mafia thug’. The shooting of the film in St Petersburg caused a sensation: one press reporter watched in shock and wonderment as a shell-suit-wearing Pyotr raced out of a basement, triggering an apparent shootout in the street. In most other countries, the sound of gunfire might have attracted curious passers-by towards the filming to watch out of curiosity. Here, concerned bystanders shrank back at what was unfolding in front of them – even when the director shouted ‘Cut’. As Serkis/Pyotr disappeared into the alarmed and puzzled crowd, it was quite obvious that many of those present had believed the events to be real, not fictional.

From time to time throughout the 1990s, Andy Serkis was reaching millions of TV viewers across Britain, practically all of whom must have been unaware of the splash he would make in the world of cinema in the early twenty-first century. Cameo roles abounded in everything from Stephen Poliakoff’s three-part drama, Shooting the Past, to the promotional video of Neneh Cherry’s 1996 top-ten hit, ‘Woman’. He was kept busy with middling roles in long-running peak-time drama series and serials, from Kavanagh QC (starring John Thaw) to The Darling Buds of May with David Jason, Pam Ferris and Catherine Zeta Jones. And yes, you guessed right: he was in The Bill. Twice.

This steady stream of television work, plus the very occasional move into radio drama, did not make him a star. What mattered was that he could always be relied upon to maintain a high standard in his performance, whatever each job entailed. ‘It was a slow, plodding process,’ he later told the Sunday Times about this period. ‘I was working regularly, in a variety of parts. So it never bothered me that I didn’t become an instant name or face.’

At least in terms of quantity, Andy Serkis’s work for the medium of TV has declined sharply in the twenty-first century. As we will discover, after 2000, he would largely concentrate on film work. ‘I suppose I am more compelled to work in film,’ he told IGN’s Filmforce in 2003, ‘because of that sense of working with people who are passionate about their particular project. Television does get caught in that terrible trap, you become a bit of a functionary because it is not your vision.’

If he was going to remain part of television’s world, then, perhaps it was preferable to make a contribution that was memorable, unusual and special. Aside from a one-off guest appearance in the BBC’s spy drama Spooks in 2004 (playing a recently knighted rock legend called Riff), Serkis now mainly confined himself to single, self-contained projects: as Ian Brady in Longford, Albert Einstein in Einstein and Eddington, or as Vincent Van Gogh for a Simon Schama series about art. (All will be covered in Chapter 11.)

Serkis, who at the age of 12 had been glued to the sight of Barrie Keeffe’s Gotcha on Play for Today, was arguing for the preservation of the single drama. Single plays with a theatrical pace were rare on television after the mid-1990s, with television films much more common. But Accused in late 2010 was one of his greatest outings for the medium. Created by Jimmy McGovern (Cracker, Hillsborough, The Street), Accused was a series of unrelated, self-contained films for BBC1. It gave actors like Serkis the luxury of having a starring role in a continuing TV drama series with a regular audience, but without having to commit to more than one story – a hybrid of leading role and guest star.

McGovern is the ultimate example of a major contemporary writer who scorns the process of writing, preferring to be regarded as someone who tells stories. ‘The only way to tell stories on TV is to convince people that what they are seeing is actually happening now and is real.’ In this respect, he shared Andy Serkis’s belief that drama – whether on stage, film or television – is first and foremost about storytelling.

In each Accused film, viewers are shown a suspect about to face sentence in a trial, and are taken back through the chain of events that brought the suspect to that point. It did not concern itself with police procedure: McGovern felt that side of crime was being explored quite enough, to the point of being overused. It wasn’t so much ‘Whodunit?’ as ‘What have they done?’ The diverse storylines were powerful. One film, starring Christopher Eccleston, recounts how a plumber, who is conducting an extramarital affair with a much-younger woman, is plunged into serious debt just as his daughter’s wedding is nearing. Another, featuring Mackenzie Crook as a terrifyingly sadistic corporal, is set in Afghanistan. The suspects were not habitual criminals. In the case of Liam Black, he ‘just snapped’: ‘I didn’t mean to kill anyone. Couldn’t kill time. Couldn’t murder a pint.’

Liam’s Story, co-written by McGovern and Danny Brocklehurst, was the fourth of Accused’s six stories, and was broadcast on BBC1 on 6 December 2010. Liam (Serkis) is a taxi driver with a gambling addiction. He is married to Roz (Neve McIntosh), who has been battling multiple sclerosis for many years. After the couple’s daughter Katy passes the entrance exam for a new school with flying colours, Liam struggles to scrape the money together to buy her a present. When he is giving an airport-bound taxi journey to a twentysomething estate agent called Emma, he is so smitten by her that he cannot help sneaking back to her home in her absence out of the country. Snooping around her living room, he steals a necklace to pass off as a present for his daughter. As he uncovers more and more about her – through private email correspondence and the contents of her iPod – and becomes her regular taxi service, his growing and corrosive obsession with her leads to disaster and tragedy.

Jodie Whittaker, who played the part of Emma, found it a privilege to work with Andy but found that their dramatic interplay had a quite specific focus, because many of their scenes took place in Liam’s taxi cab. ‘Many of our scenes in the cab were static, with Liam driving and Emma in the back seat, which does make performing quite challenging,’ said Whittaker. ‘What happens is the focus goes to their eyes. They’re communicating through eye contact via his rear-view mirror.’

Liam’s Story is a hugely emotive piece. Dominated by Serkis (he is scarcely off the screen for the full hour), we see how a troubled, though in many ways good, man falls further into calamity and criminality. Lorraine Ashbourne, who has herself appeared in McGovern series, spoke for many when she described McGovern as one of the most important contemporary writers in Britain. ‘What he writes looks simple on the page, but, when you perform it, it really comes to life. He knows how to write about people we all care about and understand.’

As Longford was about to air on Channel 4 in 2006, Andy Serkis told the Stage newspaper that his television appearances were becoming less frequent for a quite specific reason. ‘There are too many compromises in television drama, particularly in series and serials. I think it’s something to do with the repetitiveness of it. I like one-off projects because they have a passion and a drive. They are their own entity – they are films, really.’ By the time he said those words, to say that he was well established in cinema was an understatement. But his breakthrough in film would be no overnight success.