Andy Serkis, photographed exclusively for Empire at The Imaginarium, Ealing Studios.
Photography: Steve Neaves
Actor, director and performance-capture pioneer, Andy Serkis can now add the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a list of working habitats that already includes Middle-earth, the Californian redwoods and Marlinspike Hall. As part of the new issue of Empire, guest-edited by one Peter Jackson, he welcomed the magazine into his mo-cap wonderland, The Imaginarium, to talk about The Avengers: Age Of Ultron, among many other things.
“We did some work on Ultron,” Serkis reveals. “On the development of Ultron before James Spader came on board. In terms of movement styles: was he gonna be human-like? Was he going to be robot-like? So we worked with a bunch of different people, from body-popping experts to dancers, to this guy called Neil who’s nearly eight feet tall...”
Shelving thoughts of Age Of Ultron: Electric Boogaloo, conversation turned to the hands-on work his team did with James Spader and Mark Ruffalo – Ultron and Hulk, of course – to hone the physicality of their characters. “We gave Mark weights, we had voice projections so he could do his Hulk roar,” he explains. “On screen we could have a virtual representation of the low-res avatar of The Hulk, so he could come out and feel that sense of scale.”
Serkis’s “creative laboratory” is thriving as his own directorial debut, Jungle Book: Origins, takes shape and other filmmakers like Gareth Evans come to refine their own CG creations. A digital lump of clay to be pulled, shaped and moulded, is how the man himself phrases it.
Pick up the January issue of Empire, onsale on December 27, for much more from Serkis on The Imaginarium, Ultron, Lord Of The Rings, Planet Of The Apes and the future of performance-capture.