Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
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 –