Andy Serkis

Andy Serkis is a British actor much like Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, The Damned United) a brilliant, but overlooked figure with leanings towards the portrayal of real people. Where Sheen has played Sir David Frost, Brian Clough, Kenneth Williams and ex-PM Tony Blair, Serkis has taken to characters with a much harder edge. To date Serkis has taken the form of 60’s child killer Ian Brady, Albert Einstein and Blockheads front man Ian Dury.
Dury first came to fame in the late seventies, a punk and lover of language, crippled by childhood polio, a man who never lets his disability stand in his way, who grew up parentless in a home for disabled boys, and despite all his short comings as a husband, lover, father, friend and band mate, hes still somewhat of an inspiration.
And in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (named after Dury‘s biggest hit) Serkis plays him beautifully, and the film is a much to do with Dury’s rise to fame and infamy, as it is with the relationships around him mainly that between his wife Betty, lover Denise and son Baxter. The film also features a plethora of British talent, many in almost blink and you’ll miss them appearances, such as Ray Winstone, Noel Clarke and Mackenzie Crook among others.
Serkis is obviously best known for his motion capture work with Peter Jackson, bringing to life both King Kong and Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has also recently ventured back into the motion capture realm, with videogame Enslaved.
Enslaved is a new game available on both Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, a game with incredible cinematic credentials. Enslaved has been created by Cambridge based Ninja Theory, and takes the form of a remaining of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West (which was also the basis for classic TV series Monkey, and to a lesser extent the Dragonball franchise), and boasts a script from scribe Alex Garland (28 Days Later), a musical score from Mercury prize winner Nitin Sawhney, as well as Serkis portraying main character Monkey via motion capture.
And Serkis’s motion capture days are still stretched out in front of him with roles in The Adventures of Tintin as Tintin’s sidekick Captain Haddock, as Caesar in new Planet of the Apes prequel Rise of the Apes and will at some point reprise his roll of Gollum in The Hobbit, once that eventually gets of the ground.