Читать книгу Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask - Justin Lewis - Страница 8

Having abandoned visual arts as his university degree in favour of his second option, theatre studies, Andy Serkis now knew that he wanted to be an actor. He remained a member of the company at the Nuffield Studio Theatre, but the democratic nature of the department meant that productions were not star vehicles; they were for a group of performers who all held equal weight. ‘I’m really glad that I went that way, and didn’t go to drama school,’ Serkis later said of his time at Lancaster. Understanding the collaborative nature of theatre would help years later when he was confronted by the challenge of playing roles like Gollum and Kong. Serkis would always relish working with those behind the scenes. ‘I’ve been more open to that than, perhaps, some other actors who might not have wanted to get involved in it.’

Working on stage would teach Serkis stamina of all kinds: physical, psychological, emotional. It also helped him focus his mind and concentrate. ‘You don’t learn that concentration on a film set, but to play a role through two or three hours of a night, every night, and to prove it and to constantly evolve it over a period of a run…It is like you do get your emotional ballast from doing theatre.’ Serkis would come to apply this same focus for his later, substantial career in television and film.

Serkis would occasionally land a mention when the local press showed up to review one of the department’s many productions. One particularly positive notice came in January 1984, when he was cast as the villainous Iago in William Shakespeare’s Othello, under the direction of department tutor Keith Sturgess. A critic from the local newspaper, the Lancaster Guardian, wrote of Serkis, ‘A fine performance. If he had any first-night nerves, these were certainly not detectable.’ Serkis would revisit the part of Iago nearly 20 years later at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre for what remains, at the time of writing, his last major acting role for the stage.

From time to time, opportunities at other major roles abounded. In May 1985, almost exactly two years after Gotcha, Serkis found himself in another schoolroom play, this time Nigel Williams’s Class Enemy. Set in inner-city London, it followed six teenage boys, one of whom (Serkis, whose character was nicknamed ‘Iron’) used a mixture of charisma and cruelty to squeeze a five-minute ‘lesson’ out of each of his peers.

Class Enemy was one of Serkis’s last outings as a student actor. During that summer of 1985, he graduated from Lancaster University, and – as luck would have it – found himself in gainful employment almost straight away. He had been advised to seek a postgraduate place at a drama school or college, but, happily, his good fortune had secured him his first professional acting job. Because of the links between the university and the city’s Dukes Playhouse theatre, he had spent a good deal of his final academic year there, building sets and working behind the scenes. In this way, he got to know Jonathan Petherbridge, who in 1984 had been appointed the Dukes’ artistic director.

Petherbridge gave Serkis his break, and took him on as part of the theatre’s repertory company. He could not have worked as a professional actor in the UK without an Equity card and, at that time, only two Equity cards per year were given out by each rep theatre. ‘They were gold dust,’ said Serkis. ‘It was a closed shop at the time – you could not work as an actor unless you had an Equity card.’ Serkis was, in his words, ‘over the moon’ at securing his Equity card, but, by his own admission, he was so naïve about how the theatre business worked for actors that he was to have a momentary panic on his first day of rehearsal at the Dukes. ‘I was so green, I turned up, and there was an actor standing outside. He said, “Can I see your Equity card, please?”’ On telling him that it had not arrived in the post, the more experienced actor refused him entry. Momentarily crushed, Serkis soon found, to his relief, that it was a wind-up.

Over a period of about two years, then, from July 1985, Serkis would work consistently (though not exclusively) at the Dukes. His first role there was in a production of Privates on Parade. It was a musical set around the exploits of a military concert party of British soldiers in Singapore and Malaysia during the Malayan Emergency of the late 1940s. The cast was put through its paces by a former drill instructor with the Scots Guards. Twenty years later, just as Serkis was opening in King Kong all around the world, the Dukes’ archivist Bernard Gladstone remembered in the Lancashire Evening Post just how keen Serkis had been to get involved in everything. ‘Whether it was a musical, a panto or a serious play, he wanted to be in it. He was always full of life, and always keen to play oddball characters.’

‘We had strong work ethics and practices,’ Serkis has said of his time in rep in Lancaster, ‘and you had to get this amount of subsistence. I remember getting the regional Equity deputy to come down to us. I was quite militant, saying, “We’re not going to do this, unless we get our proper money.”’ It was a stance worth taking in Serkis’s view, shared by countless others in the arts, because of the sharp cuts to regional theatre funding under Margaret Thatcher’s three terms as prime minister. But, all the same, ‘the whole thing just got demoralised and every actor had to do more work for less’. On the other hand, did it mean that it was worth making actors hungrier to make their mark, in order to find out that they really wanted to act? Anyone whose heart wasn’t quite in it would soon find out. ‘People who really wanted to do it found a way there,’ admitted Serkis. ‘By hook or by crook, they worked out their contracts. People really, really went for it, because they believed that that’s what they wanted to do.’

Serkis’s time in rep under Petherbridge would be an invaluable apprenticeship. He later said of his artistic director, ‘His philosophy really affected me for a long time, in terms of how the theatre related to the community, and his whole attitude towards theatre being about storytelling, and the power of changing a local community with theatre. I carried that ethos for a long time.’ The communal nature of the Playhouse’s environment extended to some of the actors helping with musical content on some productions, and jazz lover Serkis would enhance several productions with his saxophone playing.

Some of Petherbridge’s workshops were inspired by the work of the Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, who founded the Theatre of the Oppressed. One of Boal’s techniques was to visit South American communities and encourage the people, who were not professional actors or playwrights, to devise their own plays based on their own experiences and difficulties. ‘They’d literally workshop what their common problems were for wherever they lived,’ said Serkis. ‘If it was oppression by the police, it would be that.’ Any production like this would be sufficiently open for any member of an audience watching the play to become part of it, to take over the role of the protagonist and influence the direction of the story. But Boal also believed that the way to act was to research, and bring back evidence to feed into a role. ‘The job is to bring back the evidence,’ explained Serkis. ‘Go out, research it as thoroughly as possible, inhabit it, bring it back, and get it to the audience.’

It was quite a principle, one that pushed an actor to be responsible and communicative, the very antithesis of self-indulgence. Only by investigating a part as thoroughly as possible could an actor hope to access the full persona of a character, and then be able to convey their findings to their fellow performers, a director and an audience. Serkis was eager to conduct this level of research, although, in retrospect, he had to admit to an occasional part that failed to fire him up in the right way. He regarded Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Dukes in October 1985 as one of his misfires. On the whole, it was well received, and the presentation was novel: the Dukes auditorium was converted so that the audience was on the move throughout, following the cast of 11 around the arena; the actors also functioned as ushers, musicians and guides for the audiences, who were themselves unofficially cast as onlookers to the action that unfolded. One newspaper review recommended that any paying customers should bring ‘sensible shoes and a cushion’.

Serkis found his own reading of Prince Florizel somewhat lacking: if the job of acting is to investigate a character and report back to the audience, he felt he had floundered during The Winter’s Tale’s four-week run. ‘I found nothing of any interest to show anybody,’ he confessed in 2003. ‘It’s only in hindsight that you realise that you’ve completely fucked up, basically. It’s just a sense of feeling totally unrooted, and that’s because you’ve not found something to connect with.’

Even so, if Serkis felt that he fell short on one play at the Dukes, there would be another one along within a few weeks or – at most – a month. Repertory theatre work required any actor to be versatile and flexible, and Serkis would find himself during 1986 and 1987 appearing in everything from pantomimes to Agatha Christie mysteries, and from musicals to specially commissioned works by local writers. ‘They all required different skills, playing different age ranges, completely different parts of society.’

Still only in his early twenties, Serkis was battling to establish an identity for himself, both as a young man and as a stage performer. He was obliged to imagine experiences that had not happened to him. What might it be like to play a man apprehensive about his impending marriage to a neurotic fiancée? He could explore such thoughts and feelings when cast as thirtysomething Paul in the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. Similarly, how might he react if his own career prospects in acting were compromised by a physical injury? A part as an ageing thespian in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser provided food for thought. How would he contrast his performances as two different newspaper editors in the same play (as he would in Howard Brenton and David Hare’s satire on the news media, Pravda)? Onstage and off, Andy Serkis was growing up fast.

Such was the diverse nature of the Dukes’ productions that the lack of typecasting encouraged actors like Serkis to attempt lots of working methods rather than rely on one single approach to performance. Serkis, for his part, found it unhelpful to have his mind crammed with the spectres of his previous characters, and would try his hardest to stay in the moment with any part: ‘I just tend to stick to the relevant – the world that we’re creating, wherever the director’s leading you.’

After performing in more than a dozen different plays at the Dukes Playhouse, Andy Serkis took his leave of Lancaster in 1987. He had been mostly resident there for nearly five years, and through university and rep theatre had already learnt so much. ‘My enjoyment of acting comes from inhabiting other characters,’ he would later say. ‘To be able to do that so regularly, and to be performing one and then rehearsing another…It was just a joy, really.’ It was a wealth of useful material he would call upon in his future career.

Performing with touring theatre companies would bring some fresh practical challenges. While it would be fun to visit a new town every week, the accommodation would often be cramped. ‘Of course, you’re doing it for no money, and you’re doing it all yourself – that’s enjoyable, at that level, when you’re that age.’ For a man in his twenties, it was another stage in a career adventure. ‘They were great days, because they were formative years. It was the stuff you really believed in – and I’m not saying I don’t believe in stuff now, because I do – but it was just fuelled by that youthful enthusiasm.’

Serkis’s Lancaster swansong (in July 1987) was as Lysander in the Shakespeare comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was staged outdoors, at the city’s 40-acre Williamson Park. A few years later, Jonathan Petherbridge explained to the Independent why the park was an ideal space for works by the Bard. ‘The audience feel they’re going through the same experience as the young lovers. You have to plan it carefully, though, to keep the structure clear. And few writers apart from Shakespeare have broad enough shoulders to take outdoor productions.’

Serkis and the director would reunite in the future, most notably in 1990, on another open-air project: Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. By the summer of that year, Petherbridge was running the London Bubble Tent, whose speciality lay in organising plays in parks in and around London. The Bubble Tent’s priority was to entertain, but hopefully not in a superficial fashion. ‘Half our audience doesn’t go to see any other theatre,’ the director told the Independent. ‘People come because it’s colourful. In the evening, the tent has a wonderful atmosphere – and if it rains you feel like boy scouts.’

Serkis had made his London stage debut in November 1987 in Nigel Gearing’s Berlin Days, Hollywood Nights (where he would share the limelight with another rising star, the comic improvisational actor and singer Josie Lawrence), but it was the following spring that he became involved in the most ambitious and gruelling project of his career up to that point: a two-part, seven-hour epic tragedy at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, west London.

Faust – based on a German legend – was a cross between a play and a long poem, which had been written in the early nineteenth century by the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A sprawling circus of a production that blended folklore, philosophy, romance, theology and broad humour, its sheer spectacle and length meant that no one had attempted to stage it in Britain thus far in the twentieth century. Few had even tried to bring it to life in its German homeland. Under the guidance of opera director David Freeman, the cast of 12 actors (led by Simon Callow in the title role) and one musician had their work cut out, with multiple roles for some of the company: Serkis would play eight different roles across the duology. A great deal of physical stamina and agility was additionally required of the players, who had to tackle, among other things, ropes, nets and ladders.

Faust is a figure who cannot be satisfied. He is driven by a frenzied curiosity towards a sense of contentment that both attracts and repels him. He is a chameleon of a character who, by turns, is a knight and a civil engineer, and in one review was likened to enigmatic figures both real and fictional, from Howard Hughes to Peer Gynt and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.

Faust’s three-month residency at the Lyric began in April 1988. Parts I and II ran on alternate nights of the week, but each Saturday brought a killer double bill. Simon Callow would begin each Part I as a 70-year-old Faust delivering a 40-minute speech, before being rejuvenated as a man in his mid-twenties, then coursing to the ripe old age of 120. He described the experience as like ‘climbing a mountain every day’, and explained to the New York Times that the complex personae of his role required him to overcome ‘an unbelievable series of hurdles’, from the plaintive despair of his opening soliloquy to the many shifts in voice, posture and attitude that made the ageing process of the part believable to an audience. ‘What I’m always striving for is a state of jazz, where things could always be different even when they’re not.’

Callow believed that, in order to tackle a multifaceted part like this, it was necessary to be ahead of the text and be at one with Faust’s thought processes of the character. Having painstakingly memorised his many lines, he felt it appropriate to half-forget them, so that he could retain some spontaneity for each performance, and remain receptive to whatever else was happening around him. ‘What characterises great actors is their ability to enter into the thought processes of the character,’ he said. It was the sort of commitment – investigating and researching a character – that Andy Serkis was already starting to appreciate.

The boldness of Faust was a partial response to an uncertain, worrying period for the Lyric. It had not been long since it had narrowly escaped closure. For its artistic director, Peter James, it was a throwing-down of the gauntlet. If the Lyric was to exist, it would be through taking a risk with something like Faust. ‘Everyone walked tall after that and thought, Two fingers to the world – we’ve done something good.’

It is striking how many similarities a production like Faust shares with a project like the Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy over a decade later: hard to realise convincingly as a spectacle, an epic length, a central complex character who requires great shifts of tone, and, perhaps above all else, a production that demanded that all involved should take risks. Reviewers for Faust did not call it flawless by any means, but most felt that it was well worth trying for the dazzling heights it did achieve, and despite any shortcomings that came about during the journey. Actors, directors, theatre companies, filmmakers – all must take risks from time to time.

Inspired by how investigating a character could make that character more real, Andy Serkis would reach greater heights on the London stage from the early 1990s. He aimed to explore method acting more and more, hoping to gain as much detail and authenticity as possible. But occasionally he was in danger of identifying too closely with a creation, and losing himself, for the sake of nailing a part. ‘I kind of nearly sent myself insane playing one role,’ he said much later. That role was of Dogboy, in Hush, a play by the British dramatist April de Angelis, which was staged at London’s Royal Court theatre in August and September 1992.

In Hush, Rosa (Dervla Kirwan) is trying to come to terms with her mother’s suicide the previous year, but discovers that she is pregnant after sleeping with a schizophrenic, homeless man on the beach. When the man finds that his dog has died, he suffers a breakdown, and in his anguish absorbs the canine’s spirit. He comes to be known as Dogboy, and shows up at Rosa’s family home on all-fours, naked and caked in mud, a creature summed up by a critic in The Stage as ‘a sort of modern refugee from the cruel world of King Lear’. His invasion of Rosa’s family home has a major effect on their relatively comfortable existence.

As the despairing Dogboy, Serkis does not utter a decipherable word. His way of communicating is through barks, yelps and growls, and he is symptomatic of all that cannot be contained or tamed. ‘We are not supposed to like or dislike him,’ observed the Independent on Sunday. ‘That is who he is.’ Dogboy acts as an uncomfortable reminder about those on the outside of society, and their often desperate need to be heard and helped. ‘What do you do about people who don’t quite fit?’ asked the Financial Times critic. ‘Throw them out, try to be nice to them, or send them to the social security?’

The critics were unanimous that Andy Serkis had excelled himself in the most courageous way as Dogboy, prepared to be naked and primal on stage for two and a half hours. Many years later, Serkis singled out Hush as the best possible preparation for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, who also spent countless hours crouched on all-fours. Dogboy prepared him for the challenge of embodying someone with such extreme physical and psychological behaviour.

In order to understand the character of Dogboy and his motivations, though, Serkis spent several weeks living rough on the streets. It was an early example of the lengths he would go to in order to be as true as possible to a role. He would become near-evangelical about his belief in acting, in how he regarded it as his chosen path in life, and the closest thing he had to a religious belief. He had long ago renounced the Catholicism of his childhood. ‘Once you become an actor, you can’t adhere to these things,’ he told The Times in 2006. ‘Acting doesn’t allow for absolutism. The questions you’re asked are too big to adhere to one belief system, and, whether that weakens you or not, I don’t know. I suppose sometimes I do wish I had the resolve of one belief system as a guiding measure.’

The totality of Serkis’s commitment – which he described as ‘an all-consuming quest’ – reached some kind of limitation during his preparation to become Dogboy. ‘I found that a hard role to shake off,’ he said in 2008 to the Sunday Telegraph. ‘It really messed with my head.’ Exploring Dogboy would, inevitably, become harrowing and dispiriting in an almost uncontrollable and even unhealthy way, ‘just getting deeply depressed about the hopelessness of the character and the world he lived in. I suppose I got consumed by the role, but they do always affect me. Can’t not.’ That sort of extreme research would be diluted once family life intervened during Serkis’s thirties. ‘It does alter drastically when you have children because you have to come home as a sane human being.’

After the hard-won triumph of Hush, Andy Serkis became a regular attraction in Royal Court offerings. A radical and irreverent adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, with Tom Wilkinson in the title role, opened there in January 1993. This version of Lear was set in the Edwardian era, where the Fool (Serkis) is portrayed as a transvestite, wearing a satin frock, bouffant hair-do (later removed to reveal a shaven head) and a padded bra. The reasoning behind this was to show that, with no sign of a queen in the play, the king is unable to relate to real women and so must confide in the comic jester figure of the Fool.

The sight of a Fool in drag, flitting from falsetto to no-nonsense south London gruffness, and strumming a ukulele to accompany his own original compositions, was a reworking too far for some pundits. Serkis was variously described as a ‘fashion accessory’ (London Evening Standard), looking like Angela Lansbury (Sunday Express), looking like Charley’s Aunt (Daily Express), and resembling ‘something between Dame Hilda Bracket and a tougher, punked-up Julian Clary’ (Independent). The last of these critics was at least an admiring one, arguing that this Fool-ish portrayal was less about lazy shock tactics than a comment about Lear’s misogyny and distrust of women in general.

The decision to play the Fool as a Victorian music-hall drag artist (the closest thing to womanhood in Lear’s eyes) was, indeed, carefully considered by Serkis and director Max Stafford-Clark during rehearsals. Serkis carried out thorough research into music-hall turns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining their respective performing styles. ‘I sort of created my own act, if you like, and then brought that back into the play.’ He also penned some songs – for voice and ukulele – inspired by the period’s music-hall oeuvre, and which were garnished with Shakespeare’s original words. However, while the original play does not record the fate of the Fool (he simply disappears around two-thirds of the way through), in this production, Serkis’s incarnation of him is shown to be the victim of a hanging.

Assisted by some television exposure (see Chapter 4), by the early 1990s Serkis’s stage roles, in both London and the provinces, had been steadily growing in stature, from incidental to supporting – and to starring ones. And critics on national papers were starting to take notice of him. Take, for instance, his contribution to the musical comedy Sugar, staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds at Christmas 1990. Some performers might have been tempted, if appearing in a musical comedy based on the screenplay of Some Like it Hot, simply to watch Billy Wilder’s classic film and do little more than mimic the relevant actor. To the relief of the Observer’s Michael Coveney, Andy Serkis had not just copied Jack Lemmon as Jerry/Daphne. ‘Serkis does not attempt to squeeze out Lemmon,’ he wrote early in January 1991, ‘but recycles him to match his own juice. This is a wise and cunning ploy. He respects the audience’s memory of the film while asserting his own right to bounce off it.’

Since Coveney’s appraisal, Serkis has been praised on many other occasions for how he has breathed new life into an established character from a much-revered text, be it Shakespeare, Dickens or Tolkien. How did he manage to do that, time and again? He did not watch other actors playing that part. ‘If I’m going to do something that’s been done before, I won’t watch that actor’s performance,’ he told American reporter Paula Nechak in 2004. ‘I’d end up being influenced. I’d feel disempowered, so I try and stay away from other people’s ideas.’

What doubtless kept Serkis’s mind fresh during the 1990s was a range of stage projects as broad as those he had been assigned in student drama and repertory theatre days in Lancaster. Drawing on his growing lexicon of imaginative acting techniques and styles, he was every bit as likely to commit to a new play as a classic.

He certainly excelled in Punchbag, a newly written comic play for 1993 by Red Dwarf’s Robert Llewellyn. It was set in a self-defence class for women, and Serkis donned padded armour to play Peter, a tortured soul whose function is to withstand assaults from members of the class, only to wind up smitten with one of his attackers. On one level, Peter looked absurd, ‘like a Gladiator crossed with a Transformer toy’ in the words of London’s Evening Standard. Then again, his marvellous portrayal of sexual frustration and torment for what he was being denied moved the Guardian’s Michael Billington to describe him as ‘a frog-eyed bundle of unfulfilled lust’. It was not the last time that Serkis would have to be in tip-top physical form, or tackle someone consumed by their own envy and self-disgust.

Plenty of acclaim, then, when it came to singling out Andy Serkis in individual productions. And yet, while each of these had its critical supporters, each had its detractors, too. What will help any performer’s reputation, though, is a play or film that is unanimously hailed as a contemporary classic, and, during one summer in the mid-1990s, one such play hit the London stage with considerable force. It also was one of the defining plays of its time, which placed the importance of the ensemble cast above any of its individual players.

Mojo, the first play to be written by 26-year-old Jez Butterworth, was a black comedy – sparky, tense and threatening. Its critical reception was such that it packed out the Royal Court night after night during the scorching summer of 1995. ‘That was just a buzz,’ remembered Serkis of the sensation it caused, ‘going out and playing in front of full houses, knowing that the audience was getting it.’

The play is set in a club in late 1950s Soho. The owner of Ezra’s Atlantic club in Dean Street faces a bid from one of his mobster rivals for the headlining act, teenage rock’n’roller Silver Johnny (Hans Matheson). It is not long before Silver Johnny is abducted and his owner is attacked, and then his son, manager and entourage await a further call. With lots of fast, bragging dialogue competing for space among all the cast, Serkis (as Potts) was half of a wisecracking, frequently amusing, sharp-suited double-act with Matt Bardock (as Sweets). Their vaudevillian bantering was just part of an orchestra of voices, each fighting to make itself heard – the sort of lively, noisy barrage of talking that requires careful attention from any audience.

What Butterworth and Mojo seemed to achieve, with extraordinary self-assurance, was to refresh and overhaul the stale and overcrowded genre of east London gangster drama. ‘A comedy with the psychotic pace of an Alexei Sayle sketch but the verbal precision of Beckett,’ commented the Mail on Sunday’s admiring critic. With a cast also featuring Tom Hollander and Aiden Gillen, Mojo would win several awards, including the 1995 George Devine Award, and led to the funding and shooting of a cinematic version, which also involved Serkis, and which we’ll come to in Chapter 5.

Serkis regarded Mojo as a highlight of his stage career. Another credit he remains particularly proud of is Hurlyburly by the American playwright David Rabe. It was written in 1984, and the cast of its Broadway run had included Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt and – a long time before Sex and the City made her a worldwide star – Cynthia Nixon. But it also took 13 years for Hurlyburly to be staged on British soil.

As well as Serkis, the cast over the two London runs included future James Bond Daniel Craig, Kelly Macdonald (who had made a remarkable big-screen debut in Trainspotting the previous year), Mark Benton, Jenny Seagrove and a young David Tennant. The play is a study of a group of cynical figures in Hollywood culture. All are rootless beings. Serkis played Phil, a troubled ex-con with a seething contempt for the opposite sex. Phil yearns for a big movie break, and badgers an amoral, unscrupulous casting director called Eddie (Rupert Graves), but he cannot control his short fuse and unpredictable, explosive rages. Critics such as the Guardian’s Michael Billington were struck by Serkis’s ‘terrifying sense of uncertainty that manifests itself in acts of random violence. You quiver with apprehension when he holds his baby in his arms.’

Serkis was inspired by Hurlyburly’s American-born director, Wilson Milam, to feel free onstage, and to feel relaxed with the part’s intensity. It was impossible to phone in a character like Phil. ‘Phil was just a dream part, really. Every performance felt like an improvisation.’ Not least the opening night. Shortly after 10pm on 24 March 1997, the announcement of a bomb scare meant that everyone at the Old Vic theatre in south London had to be evacuated from the building. So the maiden night of the run climaxed in a small park opposite the venue, with the cast forced to raise their voices above the heckling of the nearby road traffic. There was an implicit understanding that this was an unusual but spontaneous performance of the play, and, when one actor momentarily forgot their next line, an audience member handed them a copy of the script.

Responding to new challenges all the time had become second nature to Andy Serkis. Over many years of stage work, it was rare for him to spend longer than a three-month spell in a stage play, which lengthened the odds on his performing on autopilot. In any case, he recognised that the way to maintain an interest in a role is to address and appreciate the audience. For Serkis, a theatrical audience is forever unpredictable. ‘I never see them as passive,’ he said. ‘They’re a living, breathing organism.’ Nor was an audience a single entity, but a cluster of individuals, all with their own unique personalities. ‘As a young actor, you tend to judge them as a mass. “Oh, they’re a bit ‘this’ tonight”, or “Hmmm, they were very quiet.” As you get older, you realise audiences are made up of lots of different people.’

This is a Chair, a curio of a stage project from 1997 written by Caryl Churchill, went so far as to reverse the power balance between audience members and stage performers. The staging placed the audience of 60 on the Royal Court stage, with the actors (including Timothy Spall, Lennie James and Linus Roache, as well as Serkis) perched on the front stalls of the auditorium, ready to perform a series of sketches. Each item was preceded by music and a title caption (e.g. ‘Hong Kong’, ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Process’) that seemed to bear no relation to the deliberately mundane and everyday scenes that followed.

Serkis didn’t just learn from audiences, of course. He had been watching fellow actors and directors, absorbing and assimilating their methods over the years. ‘As an actor, you’re drawing from lots of different directors all the way down the line. So you do work as a magpie, and you pick up lots of different ways and apply them to whatever’s appropriate.’ Reluctant to take a shortcut in locating a character, he nevertheless was becoming aware of how his own mind worked in relation to a part. As a result, he was less likely to become trapped in the dead end of a character.

Andy Serkis’s many years of stage work were the making of him. They would make him an independent spirit as an actor, bring a powerful energy to his screen output, and make him think carefully about how to inhabit a character’s body and soul, and not render them superficial. They would make him sympathetic towards audiences. They would even change his life on a personal level: he would meet his future wife through stage work too.