Andy Serkis Has Stopped Arguing That Motion Capture Is Acting

Andy Serkis says he used to argue hard that performance capture is acting. Now he has mostly stopped trying to convince people.

In an interview with The Times, reported by Variety, the actor said he has talked for hours about the subject and watched listeners' eyes glaze over. He said life is too short, and that he has calmed down.

Performance capture is a technique in which cameras record an actor's movements and facial expressions, and a digital team turns them into a character. Serkis's current attitude is simple. As he put it, "If you get it? Great."

He compares the work to older craft. Serkis said a performance such as Gollum is authored by an actor, in the same way a prosthetics team engineered the look John Hurt wore in The Elephant Man. He also said a performance under a physical mask is easier for some people to understand than one under a digital mask. He added that he never really cared whether people linked him with digitally altered characters.

Those characters form a long run. Serkis played Gollum, also known as Smeagol, in The Lord of the Rings films, combining his own performance with computer-generated elements. He also played Kong in King Kong and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy.

Now he is going back to Middle-earth. Serkis is returning as Gollum and directing The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which was filming at the time of the report. The film is scheduled to open in theaters on December 17, 2027.

The returning cast includes Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Elijah Wood as Frodo and Lee Pace as King Thranduil. New faces include Kate Winslet as Marigol, Jamie Dornan as Strider, Leo Woodall as Halvard and Anya Taylor-Joy as an elf.

The awards question also came up. Peter Jackson, who directed the original trilogy, said in May that the debate over AI in film is one reason Serkis has not won awards for playing Gollum, and that he likely never will. Jackson has also said the Gollum performance is not AI-generated. He described it as a human performance, "100%" of the way.

Serkis has also written a memoir, My Pressures: The Bizarrely True Story of Andy Serkis. For a performer who spent years explaining his craft, the shift in tone is the headline. The question of who gets credit for a digital character is still being argued, but the man at the centre of it now seems content to let people decide for themselves.