Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
life in Ruislip could make Andy a tense youngster.
The boy’s unruly nature would mellow with maturity, but would be accompanied by a resigned sense of sadness about his absentee father. ‘I always mourn the fact I never got to know my father, or spent time with him,’ he told The Times in 2009, as Clement was entering his 90th year. To relate to him now was ‘unfathomable. It’s like, Where do you begin? So much has gone on. So much.’ Yet this regret was tempered by an admiration for his father’s belief in justice, supporting those people who needed it. ‘Times weren’t easy for him in Baghdad,’ Andy told the Guardian, ‘but he carried on going there because he believed in what he was doing.’
The childhood trips to the Middle East were certainly enlightening, and would help to give Andy and his siblings a sense of acceptance and flexibility about different countries and cultures that were very different from west London. These journeys, coupled with being brought up by his mother alone, also made Andy start to relate to the idea of being an outsider in society, something that he would explore a great deal in many of his stage and screen roles, from Gollum to Ian Brady. ‘We were outsiders,’ he said, ‘and I’ve always sympathised with those who feel excluded, probably as a result of this.’
From the age of 11, Andy attended St Benedict’s, a Roman Catholic school in the west London district of Ealing. The school’s other former pupils have included the biographer and critic Peter Ackroyd, the former Conservative MP and Hong Kong governor Chris (later Lord) Patten, who was appointed chairman of the BBC Trust in 2011, and the comedian Julian Clary. Clary was already entering St Benedict’s sixth form when Serkis enrolled at the school in the autumn of 1975. Although it was strictly a boys-only school at that point, some girls were admitted to its sixth form by the end of the 1970s. Serkis remembers ‘lots of gangs and lots of fights’, but was not on the receiving end of bullying. He did, however, gain a nickname: perhaps inevitably, ‘Billy Smarts’, after the famous Billy Smart’s Circus, whose spectacular shows were a mainstay of festive television at the time.
Andy’s passions during his formative years were diverse. He spent his pocket money on model kits, was a lover of cricket (the Australian wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh was a hero) and, before becoming an accomplished saxophonist, he learned to play the clarinet. The first record he ever bought, when he was about eight, was Acker Bilk’s clarinet instrumental, ‘Stranger on the Shore’, which was already around 10 years old at the time. He would become a fan of jazz later on, but the musical soundtrack to his boyhood was heavily influenced by the contents of his older sisters’ collections – the soft rock of Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp and Steely Dan. Then, when he was 14, he would first hear the music of Ian Dury, the man he would later portray to great acclaim on the big screen in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. He was travelling on a coach for a school trip when he heard ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. ‘You could hear this voice that wasn’t saying anything that you’ve ever heard before, something that was exotic and magic and weird, and yet dangerous and thrilling.’
Summer visits by the Serkis family to Baghdad – and other places too, including Damascus, Beirut and the ruins of Babylon – had ceased by 1978. Four years earlier, Ibn Sina had been converted into a military hospital by Saddam Hussein. It was now considered too dangerous an environment for their holidays. ‘Things began to get dodgy, and we couldn’t travel out there any longer,’ remembered Andy 30 years later. It would be some time before his dad returned to home turf, though: after being imprisoned briefly by the Saddam regime, Clement did not permanently relocate to the UK till 1990 (the year before Operation Desert Storm), by which time Andy was in his mid-20s. Clement’s sister was still resident in Iraq in 2007, when Andy explained to Wired magazine, ‘People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalised in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.’
At around the age of 14, then, Andy Serkis may have no longer been able to have exciting trips to other continents, but a sense of adventure had been planted in his mind and body, and he needed to continue that thirst for new challenges. It was at this point that an interest in climbing became apparent. Before long, the interest became a passion. With a few friends, he formed a mountaineering club at St Benedict’s, and soon they had progressed from hill walking to trekking and eventually to proper climbing. By then, his love for the activity was so entrenched that it helped him decide where he would further his education. Lancaster University in the North of England was on the doorstep of the Lake District, home to the highest peaks in England.
Lancaster University also boasted a highly esteemed visual-arts course. Andy was a budding artist even when young, deeply obsessed with painting and drawing. It was ‘one thing that really took a grip on me’, and, even when his mother had tried to convince him that he needed to get a proper job, he felt certain that art was the path for him. But he wasn’t sure how one became a professional artist. By the age of 16, he was aware that edging into the world of design and graphics might help maximise his chances, and so he applied for a visual-arts course at Lancaster.
Serkis’s independent spirit had formed. As time progressed, he seemed less and less likely to follow a safe, if secure, career. He was driven by instinct and desire. Years later, he would summarise this as, ‘I’m only really good at things I want to do and I’m hopeless at putting any effort into things I don’t want to do.’ His understandably cautious mother and father hoped he might knuckle down for something reliable as a career. Lylie figured he might join the army or become a surveyor. Clement may have hoped – so Andy thought – that he might have opted for anything ‘apart from becoming an actor, really…he worried that it was precarious, that the art world was a precarious living.’
Andy Serkis arrived at Lancaster University in the autumn of 1982. He was intent on concentrating solely on visual arts – that course encompassed sculpture, painting and graphic design – but he was also obliged to plump for a second option. Reluctant to do so at first, he eventually chose theatre studies, as he became aware that that department was a strong one there: the university campus had its own theatre, the Nuffield Studio Theatre. ‘You could get involved in productions, and you could design them, or go more in a direction of stage management. All sorts of areas around theatre, not just acting. They had production meetings and you’d do the whole thing properly, and you’d have a budget.’
Any spare time left over for Serkis was spent either hill walking alone in the wilderness of the Lakes, or participating in broadcasts for the student radio station, Radio Bailrigg. The service was one of the earliest student radio stations in Britain, having been launched in 1969, and over the years its airwaves have also featured regular contributions from future broadcasting giants such as James May (now of television’s Top Gear) and Richard Allinson, DJ for Capital Radio in London and, latterly, BBC Radio 2.
There was plenty of nightlife on the Lancaster campus. The University Union Great Hall would welcome many high-profile rock acts in the next couple of years, among them Echo & the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, U2, the Smiths, Julian Cope and even Tina Turner. A newly opened venue, the Sugar House, staged cabaret from many exponents of the ‘alternative comedy’ boom from the London circuit: Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, and the National Theatre of Brent (Patrick Barlow and Jim Broadbent). Nearby, on Moor Lane, there was also the Dukes Playhouse, which would showcase productions ranging from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to (in January 1984) the world premiere of a play called The Life of Einstein.
It was theatre that became Serkis’s obsession. Combining visual arts with theatre studies meant that he was set-designing for productions at the Nuffield Studio Theatre. He became involved at an opportune moment. Prior to the 1982–3 academic year, the theatre had been predominantly staging musical events. Only now was a greater emphasis being placed on drama and revue. The Theatre Studies department staged a wide range of productions from classical theatre to contemporary works, and they were often bold and left-field in their choices.
Before long, Andy Serkis became a lighting designer as well as a set designer at the Nuffield Studio, but incidental performing roles came up too from time to time: minor appearances in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I in early 1983 and a new play by Tony Marchant called The Lucky Ones. He was fascinated by the