Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Andy Serkis: From Gollum to Ian Dury

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Andy Serkis: From Gollum to Ian Dury

    Andy Serkis: From Gollum to Ian Dury
    He's very good at playing bad guys, so how will he handle a punk poet
    turned posthumous national treasure?


    Simon Hattenstone
    The Guardian,
    Saturday 2 January 2010

    Andy Serkis on Ian Dury: 'He was obnoxious, just an arse, you know.'
    <br></br&a mp;amp;gt;Photograph: Spencer Murphy

    Lefties among us might recognise Andy Serkis. Of course he was
    bug-eyed hobbit Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Sure, he gave
    us a supremely tender King Kong. Yes, he was terrifyingly eloquent as
    serial killer Ian Brady in the television drama Longford, horribly
    creepy as French prisoner Rigaud in Little Dorrit and simply monstrous
    as the interrogator in Extraordinary Rendition. But there's something
    else. Wasn't he the fella who sold the Socialist Worker on the streets
    of London back in the early 90s?

    Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Production year: 2010 Country: UK Directors:
    Mat Whitecross Cast: Andy Serkis, Mackenzie Crook, Naomie Harris,
    Olivia Williams, Ray Winstone More on this film Serkis says it was his
    days in the SWP, and his subsequent rejection of the party line, that
    made him the actor he is today. As a young socialist he was angry
    about so much: Thatcher, unemployment, racism, you name it. Actually,
    his anger went back further. As a little boy he was so angry, throwing
    such tantrums, that his three older sisters had to hold him down while
    he kicked, punched and raged. He's not sure what he was angry about
    then, but thinks it might be something to do with his absent father,
    an Iraqi gynaecologist of Armenian descent who stayed in Baghdad,
    opened a hospital, and was briefly imprisoned by the Saddam Hussein
    regime, while his English wife brought up the Serkis clan in Ruislip,
    Middlesex.

    After A-levels, Serkis went to university to study visual art (he
    still paints) and set the world to rights. The politicised Serkis
    believed the world was black and white, and when he joined the SWP he
    thought he'd found his true home - here was a party founded on
    absolute certainties. But at the same time Serkis was developing as an
    actor, and found his political ideology coming into conflict with his
    professional evolution. As an actor, he discovered moral ambiguity was
    all. Yes, he was attracted to bad men, but he wanted to humanise his
    killers and blackmailers and all-round no-gooders. He even wanted to
    try to make us understand what motivates a paedophile serial killer
    such as Ian Brady. He felt he had to make a choice between the SWP and
    acting.

    We've arranged to meet at a north London pub. As I cross the road, I
    see him walk off, so I follow at a distance, like a private eye. Has
    he done a runner before we've even met? He's wearing a black leather
    jacket, black trousers, his hair is dyed black, his eyes are Jesus
    blue. He strides purposefully and looks a little menacing, as he so
    often does in films or on stage. Eventually, he stops for the traffic
    lights to change. I tap him on the shoulder, tell him I'm supposed to
    be interviewing him.

    He gives me a confused look, then smiles. It's the same warm,
    childlike smile he uses to disarm us when he's playing nasty bastards.
    "Ah, it's just the pub wasn't open yet. I was looking for another
    one." We head off up the street and he leads me to an alternative -
    small, scruffy, with a handful of people gathered round the racing on
    TV. Serkis has got an amazing face. When he smiles, he's charming,
    sexy, handsome. When he snarls, he's world-class ugly. Few actors have
    such elastic features - somehow he can stretch his nose, repoint his
    chin, flesh out his lips to order.

    Now he is playing Ian Dury, the rock'n'roll wordsmith with a polio
    gait, in the film Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. It's a classic Serkis
    part, wonderfully played - the beautiful grotesque who championed
    disabled people while raging against his misfortune, the drug-addled
    philanderer and loving father, the twisted cynic who can't hide his
    romantic optimism. As so often, Serkis inhabits the character (he even
    sings Dury's songs) rather than plays him. So much so that it's a
    surprise when I see he's not limping today.


    Watch the trailer for Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Link to this video
    We're sat down on battered chairs, a pint of bitter each, and he still
    seems to be talking the Ian Dury talk - 'eavy, gruff, nice'n'sleazy,
    'alf cockney geezer. That's the thing about his kind of acting - you
    can't simply pick up characters and drop them at will. Before playing
    King Kong, he studied gorillas in captivity at London Zoo, then went
    to Rwanda to observe them in the wild. When he played a City spiv in
    Mike Leigh's Career Girls, he spent months working with dealers, cut
    off contact from his friends and had to learn to play the violin (his
    contribution was eventully cut down to one scene, which didn't include
    the violin). "I was actually trading, and in the end they offered me a
    job. They said you'll be on £80,000 a year, plus bonuses." How much
    was he earning then as an actor? "Ooh, er, like, nothing."

    When he and his wife to be, fellow actor Lorraine Ashbourne, were
    playing lovers in Your Home In The West in 1991 at Manchester's Royal
    Exchange, they decided to research their roles by meeting up for real
    in character and imagining their first time out together. They got off
    with each other, in character, and have been together ever since. As
    Gollum, it wasn't enough to play a troubled hobbit with a weird voice;
    he had to know where his pain came from. "His voice was based on our
    cat coughing up fur balls," Serkis says.

    For the Dury film, he spent months walking with a heavy 70s-style
    calliper attached to his leg and working out only on the right side of
    his body." He's been left with back pain, and a "massive weird muscle"
    has developed in his groin. "I'm still recovering from it all."

    As a young man, Serkis adored Dury - he was so witty, original and had
    overcome so much. Then he met him. "He was obnoxious. We were in a
    Chinese restaurant and he slagged eveybody off and was just an arse,
    you know. And that same night, Mickey Gallagher, who was one of
    [Dury's band] 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."

    But that's what Serkis loved about Dury - he was anything but a
    sanitised victim, and the film would never suggest he was. "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 and Baxter [Dury's second wife and oldest son], 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."

    Whenever he takes on a character, he looks for what they have in
    common, and Serkis, 45, says the two men share a near obsessive drive
    to fulfil themselves creatively. "Ian knows there's only a certain
    amount of time we have on this planet, and if you've got a family,
    there are going to be casualties. There isn't a moral to the story,
    but it's like, be magnificent in the short amount of time you've got.
    And I think I live my life by that code, but we also have real life to
    deal with. Where the Venn diagram crosses over between me and Ian is
    wanting to do the very best you can in the short space of time you've
    got, but give everything you can equally to the people you love and
    who are your life. That's a really difficult thing."

    It seems to be a conflict very much at the heart of Serkis's life. He
    and Lorraine have three children; he loves chasing them round the
    house, playing monsters, and is desperately aware that he is not there
    for them as often as he would like to be. (He spent nearly two years
    in New Zealand shooting Lord Of The Rings, and is soon off again to
    shoot The Hobbit.) And sometimes, he says, even when he is there, he
    isn't really because he's lost in a character. "You're watching your
    kids playing football and you're not present. It's like the worst...
    it's horrible. I despise myself for it." He says it with a quiet,
    shocking intensity, stands up and gets the next round in. "I think
    it's a particularly male thing. Being present and in the moment with
    your kids is something a lot of men struggle with."

    We're talking politics and compromise. He's no longer in the SWP, but
    still thinks of himself as being on the left. At the 2003 Oscars, he
    brought along for company a "No War For Oil" banner. He and Lorraine
    recently argued about education - he believes in state education, she
    favours private. Lorraine won.

    As he worried that his mind was not open enough in his SWP days, he
    now worries that his mind is too open. He tells me how he tried to get
    into the head of Moors murderer Ian Brady. "When I played him, I
    thought, what's the most beautiful thing that's happened in my life?
    Well, it was witnessing my three children being born at home in a
    birthing pool in my living room, and I thought, well, for Ian Brady,
    the most beautiful thing must have been taking life away from a
    child."

    A chill runs through my veins. That's horrible, I say. Serkis nods. "I
    know, it's a really scary thought, but if you take the role on, you
    have to go down that route."

    Does he find at times he's unsure what he actually believes because
    he's borrowing a character's moral code? He smiles. "I do listen to
    myself sometimes and think, is my moral compass so easily swayed by
    the characters I play, or is it me growing as a human being?"

    He loves acting, he says, and does not intend to give it up, but he is
    turning more towards directing. He made a great little short film
    called Snake about a prostitute (played by his wife), tattoos, a
    mysterious bag of money and an unwanted kidney transplant. Filmed in
    black and white, it is creepy and cool and disturbingly funny.

    Why is he focusing more on directing? Well, he says, it goes back to
    what we've been talking about. He would like to approach things more
    objectively, from a distance. He talks about the times he worked with
    Mike Leigh and couldn't tell his family what he was doing because
    those were the rules, and found himself leading a secret double life.
    And if you're attracted to difficult, often unpleasant characters, of
    course it's going to mess with your head. "The whole chameleon thing
    about acting. That's why I'm moving towards directing - it's a much
    more healthy occupation."

    - Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll opens on January 8.
Working...
X