Quotes

[on playing Gollum in Lord of the Rings:] "Everyone has their own interpretation of what he is, what he looks like and how he sounds. So it was up to me to just trust my own instincts."

"We didn't want to anthropomorphize him to the point where we were explaining every single little gesture. Gorillas, both in captivity and the wild, have an enigmatic quality - a sense of disconnect, of otherness" - on his title character in King Kong (2005).

I do feel incredibly liberated when I'm inside another's skin, basically, and so method does afford you that, hugely.

I've always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession you have to be. You have to be open to going where your emotions take you. Acting is a sort of pressure cooker that allows the fizz to come out the top. God knows what I'd be like if I didn't have that. Even more animal, perhaps.

[on learning at 'ape school' how to walk and move like a simian, playing Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)] When you are watching yourself as an actor who has played a computer-generated role [King Kong], obviously you are looking to see if your performance has fully manifested itself on the screen, and if it contains all the original intention that was put there. And what I've seen,so far, has delighted me, because I know Rupert [Wyatt] has been devoted to try and push the emotional core of all the performances right through the post-production phase.

[ on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)] Trying to get back into the head of "Gollum", it felt like kinda doing an impersonation if a character I had played. It was weird 'cause it was like having to re-own it again.

[about his motion capture work for Gollum and for King Kong] I thought, man, I'm going to go from a three-and-a-half foot ring junkie to a twenty-five-foot gorilla, you know, and this is the end of typecasting as we know it! [On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015), 11 July 2017]

[Stephen Colbert asks Serkis to read a few Tweets by Pres. Donald Trump in the voice of Gollum] "The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty. Purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate! Sad." "Despite the constant negative press, covfefe--" Wait, wait. What's covfuffy, Precious? [Colbert replies, "No one knows."]

[on Mowgli] We wanted to engage much more closely with the tone of the book. It's not so much a child's fairy tale. This has a reality to it. There is real consequence. This is definitely drawn from Kipling and has a much darker approach to the story telling. There's no singing or dancing by the animals - that's for sure... ...one of the main themes in this movie is: Who am I, in the world of animals, and in the world of man? It all hinges on the quest to find his own identity. The journey is immense, and I think it will be very surprising for an audience. People have such strong preconceptions about the characters and the story. This will shatter those preconceptions.