Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
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