Hail, Caesar: How the ‘Planet of the Apes’ Reboot Cemented Andy Serkis as the King of Motion Capture

Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, past and present, are so recognizable that audiences could pick them out from nothing more than their silhouette: the hulking frame of Arnold Schwarzenegger; the running cadence of Tom Cruise; the fighting stance of Bruce Lee. Conversely, there are chameleonic actors known for completely disappearing into a role, perhaps none greater than the recently retired Daniel Day-Lewis. But there’s no figure in Hollywood quite like Andy Serkis: a performer whose finest work transcends his flesh-and-blood appearance and has been at the forefront of ever-evolving technology.

The Ringer’s Streaming Guide

There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.

Even if you couldn’t put a face to the name, odds are that you’re quite familiar with the characters that Serkis has inhabited, ranging from The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum and The Adventures of Tintin’s Captain Haddock to King Kong. What unites these performances is the use of motion capture, a complex technology that essentially captures the movements and facial expressions of an actor before rendering them onto a digital character. As Serkis has explained in interviews, he became a mo-cap pioneer while auditioning for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Initially, he was intended to be only a voice actor for Gollum, but director Peter Jackson was so impressed by Serkis’s physicality that he was invited to set, where the character was modeled on his movements with this new, largely unproven technology. (As for Gollum’s raspy voice, Serkis was mimicking his cat coughing up a hairball.)

While Serkis’s work in Jackson’s trilogy—and later, his reunion with the filmmaker for the King Kong remake—was widely acclaimed, most of the mo-cap work from that era wasn’t up to snuff. Aside from being universally loathed by the Star Wars fan base, The Phantom Menace’s Jar Jar Binks was a soulless mo-cap creation; similarly, The Polar Express, the first film to entirely use motion-capture animation, descended into the uncanny valley. But as the technology keeps developing, these digital creations not only look better; they’ve enhanced an actor’s work in bringing these characters to life. In fact, motion capture has become so ingrained in blockbuster filmmaking that it’s been featured in eight of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time. Serkis, meanwhile, continues to be the leading digitally rendered face of motion capture, even cofounding a production company, the Imaginarium, specializing in this new art form.

However, while the technology’s importance in the industry continues to grow, recognition for the work done by the actors hasn’t followed suit. To date, there hasn’t been a motion capture performance nominated for an Oscar. While some of that might be down to how confusing it is to understand the nuances of motion capture—where does the technology end and the performance begin?—it also means that Serkis’s groundbreaking mo-cap work has never been acknowledged on Hollywood’s biggest stage. It’s easy to imagine Serkis one day receiving an honorary Oscar for his revolutionary body of work, similar to Jackie Chan’s recognition by the Academy for decades of martial arts cinema. And if that moment in the spotlight does arrive, there’s one role from Serkis’s mo-cap résumé that stands above the rest: the second time he portrayed a damn, dirty ape.

Since the first film premiered in 1968, the Planet of the Apes franchise has relied on impressive prosthetics to transform its actors into evolved primates. But beginning with the 2011 prequel-cum-reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the movies have used motion capture from Weta FX, the New Zealand–based visual effects company responsible for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and James Cameron’s Avatar franchise. From there, casting Serkis was a no-brainer. In Rise, pharmaceutical chemist Will Rodman (James Franco) is testing a possible cure for Alzheimer’s disease on chimpanzees before one of the subjects is forced out from her enclosure and is killed. But as Will soon discovers, the frightened chimp was merely protecting its newborn, which he brings home and names Caesar (Serkis). Since his mother was injected with a drug that increased her intelligence, Caesar is an extremely gifted primate, capable of sophisticated communication via sign language.

It’s a fascinating role for Serkis, who has to not only convey a range of emotions with his physicality and facial expressions, but inhabit a character that is, effectively, caught between two worlds: mankind and his own species. (Incidentally, Rise came out in the same year as Project Nim, a deeply disturbing documentary about a chimp who was raised as a human child.) Eventually, when Caesar is taken to an animal control facility after attacking Will’s neighbor—FWIW, the neighbor had it coming—he experiences the dark heart of humanity firsthand, sowing the seeds for an uprising. While previous Planet of the Apes movies tackled social issues, Rise explored the horrors of animal testing and is so emotionally affecting that you’ll come out the other side rooting against our species. When Caesar finally does speak, standing up to the abusive animal caretaker played by Tom Felton, it hits like a ton of bricks.

At the time, the nuances of Serkis’s performance were hard to grasp, so much so that Franco penned a column for Deadline about why his costar’s work was worthy of industry recognition. “There are plenty of Oscar-winning performances that depended on prosthetic make-up to help create the characters: John Hurt’s in The Elephant Man, Nicole Kidman’s in The Hours, Sean Penn’s in Milk,” Franco wrote. “Those actors depended on make-up artists to augment the look of their characters, but the performance underneath came solely from the actors. Well, that’s exactly the same position that Andy is in, his problem is that the digital ‘make-up’ is so convincing that it makes people forget that he provides the soul of Caesar.” But if there were any lingering doubts about Serkis’s importance to Rise or breathing life into Caesar, they were squashed by the film’s terrific sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Beginning after a 10-year time gap in which most of humanity was wiped out by the so-called Simian Flu—a virus originating from the experimental drugs meant to cure Alzheimer’s in Will’s lab—Dawn follows Caesar as he establishes a colony of genetically enhanced apes in the redwoods outside San Francisco. When the apes come into contact with a small group of human survivors who want to restore power in the city by activating a hydroelectric dam, Caesar is conflicted between helping them and protecting his colony. This time, Caesar’s foil comes in the form of a fellow ape, Koba (Toby Kebbell), who spent his entire life being experimented on by humans. Even if his instincts about mankind’s deceitful, self-interested nature are correct, Koba is so driven by hate that he risks destroying all that Caesar has built for them.

The ideological divide between Caesar and Koba (and the inevitable disaster that follows) evokes the works of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies—all while centered on a community of talking apes. But the fact that the movie handles its underlying themes with such care and thoughtfulness, rather than campiness, is its greatest strength. Dawn director Matt Reeves places that much faith in not only the technical wizardry of Weta’s visual effects, but also the actors tasked with imbuing these primates with genuine pathos. Serkis’s performance has evolved, too: No longer just an ape coming to terms with his place in the world, Caesar is burdened by the responsibilities of fatherhood and leadership. So much of that weariness is carried in Caesar’s wonderfully expressive eyes, which happen to be the first and last images of Dawn, as if there were any doubts that this is Serkis’s blockbuster to carry.

Reeves returned to direct the trilogy ender, War for the Planet of the Apes, which dials up the doom and gloom. Koba’s actions in Dawn have led to war between the surviving humans and Caesar’s colony, which has retreated farther into the woods. Sadly, it’s not enough for Caesar to protect those closest to him: Within the opening half hour of the movie, his eldest son and his wife are killed by Colonel J. Wesley McCullough (Woody Harrelson), a sadistic paramilitary leader in the vein of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. Instead of leading the apes to pastures new, Caesar begins a single-minded quest for revenge against the colonel, mirroring the rage that once fueled Koba.

What’s so astonishing about War is just how much of it sticks to Caesar’s experience; there are hardly any scenes removed from his perspective over the film’s 140-minute running time. (Even the colonel shows up only sporadically, though Harrelson makes the most of it.) War, in turn, rests on Caesar’s internal conflict between personal vengeance and the survival of his community and the realization that there isn’t room for both. He suffers through his journey, as does his clan when they’re captured by the colonel and face a horrific future: ape labor camps in which anyone too weak to continue toiling away is executed.

Caesar doesn’t need to say anything during these moments: Once again, we can see all the pain and sorrow in his expressions. That a digitally rendered creation is capable of evoking such complexity—and can invoke an emotional reaction from the audience as strong as that of any flesh-and-blood protagonist—feels like a magic trick. By the end of War, Serkis hadn’t just portrayed a multifaceted hero that belongs in the pantheon: He led the greatest blockbuster trilogy since the journey to Middle Earth.

Of course, a successful franchise never stays buried for long: This Friday marks the release of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a stand-alone sequel taking place centuries after Caesar’s reign. At this point, the last remnants of humanity have regressed to a primitive state, while a new ape king, Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), perverts his predecessor’s teachings by subjugating his own kind. As for Serkis, while he could’ve played another ape in the franchise, Kingdom director Wes Ball ultimately decided his work as Caesar was “too iconic.” No arguments there: What Serkis achieved in the rebooted trilogy remains the standard-bearer for mo-cap excellence from a master of the form. As anyone following in the footsteps of Serkis’s performance, and Caesar’s legacy, will soon learn: Heavy is the head that wears the crown.