Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Every aspect of the production interested him, down to wondering how the brickwork on the sets for the ‘little shop’ had been painted. Theatre was an inviting new world, an exciting destination to escape to, just like the Baghdads and Damascuses he had visited as a child.
Actually working in theatre was a different proposition from watching it, though, obviously. The demystification started in his first term at Lancaster, and it was a slightly disappointing discovery to find that, for instance, no one painted the reverse sides of the sets. ‘I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid. “What’s on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.” It’s a bit of a shame, really.’
A life-changing moment for Andy Serkis came in his third term at Lancaster, in the summer of 1983, when he was cast in the lead role of a confrontational play. Gotcha was penned by the playwright Barrie Keeffe in the mid-1970s, and told the story of a disaffected pupil at school (known as ‘The Kid’) who, on the final day of term, holds his chemistry teacher hostage. ‘He has this packet of 20 cigarettes and he’s holding them over the petrol tank of a motorbike and basically launches a tirade at this teacher. I thought it was so powerful,’ remembered Serkis. But he was already familiar with the play, anyway, from a TV showing six years earlier. He had seen it on television just days before his 13th birthday in April 1977, when a production of it – starring Phil Davis as The Kid – had been shown as part of the BBC’s long-running Play for Today strand.
Gotcha had also been performed in Lancaster a few months earlier when a visiting theatre company staged it at the city’s Dukes Playhouse. It is not known if Serkis saw it there, but there’s no doubt that, when he was cast as The Kid, he felt totally liberated to immerse himself in the persona of someone else. He instinctively recognised a lost soul in The Kid, ‘factory fodder…who was going to be undervalued for the rest of his life. I could tell people about it.’ When he communicated the role at the university theatre in Lancaster, he knew that he couldn’t sit behind a drawing board for the rest of his life. ‘When I played that role, that was it. I knew this is what I wanted to do at the age of 19,’ he said. He felt so comfortable in connecting with such a powerful character that he thought, ‘I’ll have some more of that.’ Of course, he wanted to prance about onstage, but it was also ‘a real calling’.
So it was, in the balmy summer of 1983 – the close of his first academic year at Lancaster University – that Andy Serkis decided to drop visual arts and change course. Fortunately, Lancaster had a module system whereby a student could build a degree (called an Independent Studies Degree) from lots of seemingly disparate subjects. ‘I drew elements from the arts. I still did little bit of set designing. I concentrated on areas like Stanislavski and Brecht and theatre history, and then some practical stuff like mime and dance.’ His artistic background would serve him well in acting, too, when it came to spatial awareness: being able to relate to different environments, and understanding what one’s relationship is within that space.
Serkis was full of trepidation, though, as to how to convince his parents that he was doing the right thing. They, who would have preferred their firstborn son to embrace a career as a lawyer – ‘something solid and professional’ – had been uneasy enough that he had planned to be a painter. For him now to reject art in favour of acting would, for a short time, horrify them. ‘There was this resounding silence down the telephone,’ he told The Times’s Hugo Rifkind in 2010.
But both Clement and Lylie had carved out successful careers – in medicine and education – in contexts that can be unpredictable and that require flexibility and sensitivity. Both of their professions have required them to react to occurrences that are unfamiliar at times. That familiarity with the unfamiliar had been mirrored in Serkis’s travels back and forth from the Middle East during his earlier years, which would lay the foundations for the unpredictability of acting. ‘It was having a childhood filled with journeys and new experiences that prepared me for it. It was putting yourself onto a path and not quite knowing where you were going to end up, that was at the root of my life.’
THE INVESTIGATOR: SERKIS AND STAGE WORK
Having abandoned visual arts as his university degree in favour of his second option, theatre studies, Andy Serkis now knew that he wanted to be an actor. He remained a member of the company at the Nuffield Studio Theatre, but the democratic nature of the department meant that productions were not star vehicles; they were for a group of performers who all held equal weight. ‘I’m really glad that I went that way, and didn’t go to drama school,’ Serkis later said of his time at Lancaster. Understanding the collaborative nature of theatre would help years later when he was confronted by the challenge of playing roles like Gollum and Kong. Serkis would always relish working with those behind the scenes. ‘I’ve been more open to that than, perhaps, some other actors who might not have wanted to get involved in it.’
Working on stage would teach Serkis stamina of all kinds: physical, psychological, emotional. It also helped him focus his mind and concentrate. ‘You don’t learn that concentration on a film set, but to play a role through two or three hours of a night, every night, and to prove it and to constantly evolve it over a period of a run…It is like you do get your emotional ballast from doing theatre.’ Serkis would come to apply this same focus for his later, substantial career in television and film.
Serkis would occasionally land a mention when the local press showed up to review one of the department’s many productions. One particularly positive notice came in January 1984, when he was cast as the villainous Iago in William Shakespeare’s Othello, under the direction of department tutor Keith Sturgess. A critic from the local newspaper, the Lancaster Guardian, wrote of Serkis, ‘A fine performance. If he had any first-night nerves, these were certainly not detectable.’ Serkis would revisit the part of Iago nearly 20 years later at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre for what remains, at the time of writing, his last major acting role for the stage.
From time to time, opportunities at other major roles abounded. In May 1985, almost exactly two years after Gotcha, Serkis found himself in another schoolroom play, this time Nigel Williams’s Class Enemy. Set in inner-city London, it followed six teenage boys, one of whom (Serkis, whose character was nicknamed ‘Iron’) used a mixture of charisma and cruelty to squeeze a five-minute ‘lesson’ out of each of his peers.
Class Enemy was one of Serkis’s last outings as a student actor. During that summer of 1985, he graduated from Lancaster University, and – as luck would have it – found himself in gainful employment almost straight away. He had been advised to seek a postgraduate place at a drama school or college, but, happily, his good fortune had secured him his first professional acting job. Because of the links between the university and the city’s Dukes Playhouse theatre, he had spent a good deal of his final academic year there, building sets and working behind the scenes. In this way, he got to know Jonathan Petherbridge, who in 1984 had been appointed the Dukes’ artistic director.
Petherbridge gave Serkis his break, and took him on as part of the theatre’s repertory company. He could not have worked as a professional actor in the UK without an Equity card and, at that time, only two Equity cards per year were given out by each rep theatre. ‘They were gold dust,’ said Serkis. ‘It was a closed shop at the time – you could not work as an actor unless you had an Equity card.’ Serkis was, in his words, ‘over the moon’ at securing his Equity card, but, by his own admission, he was so naïve about how the theatre business worked for actors that he was to have a momentary panic on his first day of rehearsal at the Dukes. ‘I was so green, I turned up, and there was an actor standing outside. He said, “Can I see your Equity card, please?”’ On telling him that it had not arrived in the post, the more experienced actor refused him entry. Momentarily crushed, Serkis soon found, to his relief, that it was a wind-up.
Over a period of