Andy Serkis - The Man Behind the Mask. Justin Lewis
up of lots of different people.’
This is a Chair, a curio of a stage project from 1997 written by Caryl Churchill, went so far as to reverse the power balance between audience members and stage performers. The staging placed the audience of 60 on the Royal Court stage, with the actors (including Timothy Spall, Lennie James and Linus Roache, as well as Serkis) perched on the front stalls of the auditorium, ready to perform a series of sketches. Each item was preceded by music and a title caption (e.g. ‘Hong Kong’, ‘The Northern Ireland Peace Process’) that seemed to bear no relation to the deliberately mundane and everyday scenes that followed.
Serkis didn’t just learn from audiences, of course. He had been watching fellow actors and directors, absorbing and assimilating their methods over the years. ‘As an actor, you’re drawing from lots of different directors all the way down the line. So you do work as a magpie, and you pick up lots of different ways and apply them to whatever’s appropriate.’ Reluctant to take a shortcut in locating a character, he nevertheless was becoming aware of how his own mind worked in relation to a part. As a result, he was less likely to become trapped in the dead end of a character.
Andy Serkis’s many years of stage work were the making of him. They would make him an independent spirit as an actor, bring a powerful energy to his screen output, and make him think carefully about how to inhabit a character’s body and soul, and not render them superficial. They would make him sympathetic towards audiences. They would even change his life on a personal level: he would meet his future wife through stage work too.
When Andy Serkis met fellow actor Lorraine Ashbourne in the last days of the 1980s, it was unlikely that either of them thought for a moment that they would become a couple, marry, have three children, and still be together more than 20 years later – especially in the entertainment business, where there are often unwelcome whispers about the security of celebrity marriages. But, then, neither Serkis nor Ashbourne behaves like a celebrity in the first place. Both are principled, hard-working and acclaimed actors who don’t tend to give interviews unless it is to discuss their work. Just occasionally, though, both have offered an insight into their lives together away from acting.
They first met at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in December 1989, when they were cast in the same play. Both were familiar with the venue in different ways. Ashbourne had worked as an usherette there some years earlier. Serkis had trodden its boards in 1988 in a tense and radical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was performed as a play within a play: a group of concentration-camp prisoners, all with cropped hair and dressed in striped pyjamas, are forced to mount their own production of the Shakespeare play. With no other costumes or sets to refer to, it became a play for voices, as performed by a nervous company who were in fear not of negative reviews, but of their own lives at the hands of the Nazis.
‘It’s an incredible theatre, an indoor round space,’ Serkis said of the Royal Exchange, which, despite seating a maximum of 750 people, felt like a very intimate venue, because it was in the round. ‘You can really sense every single, individual member of the audience – especially with Shakespeare. It worked perfectly in there. I could relate to the audience, too. I was very much feeding off of who they were.’
At the turn of the 1990s, then, Andy and Lorraine opened at this same venue in She Stoops to Conquer. Written by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773, the play was a ‘comedy of manners’, in which characters carefully endeavour to maintain the utmost politeness and etiquette, despite the disasters that unfold around them. It was intended to provide theatregoers with an alternative to the many pantomimes dominating Manchester’s other theatres over the Christmas period but, despite its unseasonal flavour, it sold out its entire seven-week run before setting off on a national tour.
Sharing a stage with a cast that at various points included a Yorkshire terrier and a Border collie, Serkis played Tony Lumpkin, an impish playboy with a liking for practical jokes. His mother, Mrs Hardcastle, was portrayed by Una Stubbs, perhaps best known for her long-running role as Rita, daughter of bigot Alf Garnett, in the TV sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part and In Sickness and in Health. In fact, She Stoops to Conquer was not the first time that Stubbs and Serkis had explored the mother–son dynamic: earlier, in 1989, they had done so on television in the BBC comedy series, Morris Minor’s Marvellous Motors (see Chapter 4).
Lorraine played Mr Hardcastle’s lascivious daughter Kate in She Stoops to Conquer, so, as she and Andy were playing, essentially, siblings, there would be no sexually charged encounters onstage between them. Was there love at first sight between the pair backstage, though? Seemingly not, as Ashbourne would recall a decade later. ‘There was no spark between us at all. I wouldn’t say I disliked him. I just didn’t get to know him.’
Relations between the pair were very different just over a year later when they shared the stage in another Royal Exchange production. Your Home in the West was an angry, gutsy new work by Rod Wooden, set on a rundown estate in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne. Ashbourne played Jean Robson, a woman trapped in a vicious circle of prostitution and with a daughter likely to follow her into the same line of work. As Jean’s Irish boyfriend Sean, Serkis was a club performer with ambition: one scene found him accompanying himself on the guitar as he sang the song ‘Your Little Grey Home in the West’.
Your Home in the West was sombre fare all in all, but had it been at all light-hearted, it would have stifled audience empathy for the characters’ unhappiness, and been little more than a contemptuous cartoon. And it didn’t seem the most obvious environment for romantic relations to flourish between them, but flourish they most certainly soon would. Their personal relationship grew out of a professional need to explore their roles in the play. ‘We actually decided to meet in character,’ Andy recalled 20 years later. ‘So we met up at this pub at the back of the station and began talking.’ Though, as he admitted, ‘I think subconsciously it was just a way of getting off with one another.’
‘Meeting Andy wasn’t a life-changing experience,’ Lorraine emphasised in retrospect. ‘Our relationship developed gradually. We would do a play together, then not see each other for a few months, then work together again. We just became closer and closer.’
Lorraine Ashbourne is three years Andy Serkis’s senior. She was born in 1961 in Manchester, and trained at the Webber-Douglas Academy drama school in London, where her contemporaries included Ross Kemp, later Grant Mitchell in EastEnders and the star in the ITV action series, Ultimate Force. While at Webber-Douglas, she was told by one teacher that she faced a difficult time as a professional actor. ‘I was told that I wouldn’t be commercially viable until I was past my twenties, which for a woman of 21 was a pretty terrifying prospect.’
She would prove that teacher wrong. Gaining her Equity card by singing in clubs, in 1985 she made her professional stage debut in Steaming, a play by Nell Dunn set behind the white tiles of a Turkish baths. Further roles followed in everything from farces to pantomimes to musicals. The late 1980s found her graduating to film work: Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (a series of vignettes about working-class Britain in the 1940s and 1950s), and then, in 1989, Resurrected. There were guest spots, too, on television, including cameos in The Bill, London’s Burning and Casualty. The nature of long-running TV dramas about the three emergency services – police, fire, ambulance – with essentially a standalone story meant that there were many vacancies for young actors to portray suspects, eyewitnesses and victims of accidents or their relatives. In turn, those same actors were trying to gain a foothold in small-screen work. We’ll see in Chapter 4 how such TV guest spots would also help Andy Serkis.
During the 1990s, both Lorraine and Andy became used to the mad whirl of trying to maintain a relationship while separately having to attend film or television location shoots, or stage work. From time to time, their professional