Andy Serkis Says He Was ‘Evangelical’ About Performance Capture After Playing Gollum in ‘Lord of the Rings’ but Now Accepts It’s ‘Misunderstood’: ‘If You Get It? Great’

Andy Serkis says he has stopped trying to persuade people that performance capture is acting, because he believes the technology remains widely misunderstood. Reflecting on playing Gollum, he says the character’s performance was authored by him, with computer-generated imagery serving as a digital mask.

Serkis is filming and directing *The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum*, due in cinemas on 17 December 2027. Peter Jackson has argued that concerns about AI may make awards recognition harder for performance-capture roles, despite describing Serkis’s work as entirely human-generated. The film also features returning actors Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood and Lee Pace, alongside new cast members including Kate Winslet, Jamie Dornan and Anya Taylor-Joy.