Ping-pong balls,
Star Wars and giant apes: what do you want to ask the king of motion capture?
Andy Serkis has starred in some of the biggest film trilogies – as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Supreme Leader Snoke in the latest Star Wars – without actually physically appearing in them at all.
Serkis is responsible for the voice and motion capture of the computer-generated characters we see instead. Motion capture means acting on set, covered in Lycra and special motion capturing ping-pong balls, so that the
Hollywood super-computers can turn his human form into a gold ring-loving monster, super-intelligent ape or Force-sensitive genetic strandcast male humanoid created during the reign of the Galactic Empire to lure the unwary to the Dark Side.