Andy Serkis Has Calmed Down About Motion Capture, but Not About Gollum

Few actors have spent as long defending their craft as Andy Serkis. Early reviews of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ questioned who was really behind the mask, and the skepticism has never fully gone away. Even performance capture, which records audio, facial and body movements at the same time, has struggled to shake the idea that it is something other than acting.

The awards world has made that divide hard to ignore. Empire pointed out how odd it seemed that John Hurt earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for ‘The Elephant Man’ while Serkis never got one for ‘The Two Towers’. Serkis has been making his case for years, too. Back in 2011, he described himself as a bit evangelical and said performance capture was still misunderstood.

That brings us to his latest comments. ComicBook.com shared a quote from Variety in which Serkis says the technology is “so misunderstood.” He admits he used to be evangelical about it and would talk for hours while “eyes glaze over,” but says life is too short and that he has calmed down. These days, his attitude is simply “If you get it? Great.”

He didn’t back away from the core argument, though. Serkis says performances like Gollum are authored by an actor, in the same way a prosthetics team engineered Hurt in ‘The Elephant Man.’ To him, it’s strange that a performance beneath a physical mask is easier for some people to understand than one beneath “a digital mask.”

The Hurt comparison is one Serkis has leaned on for a long time. He has previously noted that Hurt was totally unrecognizable on screen and that a team of special effects makeup artists helped create his look. The point is that artistry augmenting a performance doesn’t erase the performer, whether the tool is latex or code.

The timing of the remarks is hard to separate from what Serkis is doing right now. Filming on ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’ was underway by mid-July, with Serkis confirming that shooting had begun a little over a week earlier. The movie also puts him at the center of the AI conversation, since he told Variety the production is using AI to de-age cast members and nothing more.

Serkis has drawn a firm line between that and what he does as a performer. He told Variety that AI can’t, at least not yet, replicate the sort of ‘authored performance’ that motion capture records, and he has called motion capture work long overdue for recognition. Read alongside his new comments, it sounds like the same argument delivered with less of the old crusading energy.

He isn’t the only one in his corner. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ filmmaker Peter Jackson has said he doesn’t dislike AI in film, but thinks it’s a shame that the debate is partly why Serkis will never win awards for playing Gollum. That adds a new wrinkle to a debate that was already complicated.

Serkis has also been moving between formats himself. His film ‘Animal Farm,’ in theaters since May 1, 2026, started out as a motion-capture project before shifting to animation. For a man so closely tied to performance capture, it was a surprising turn.

For fans, the takeaway is less about winning an argument and more about how he now carries it. After more than 2 decades of explaining why Gollum counts as acting, Serkis seems content to let the work speak. Whether the Academy ever catches up is another question entirely.