Andy Serkis over Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars

We weten tot op heden maar weinig van Andy Serkis‘ personage Supreme Leader Snoke uit Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In een gesprek met Entertainment Weekly liet de acteur weten dat Snoke een geheel nieuw personage is in de Star Wars canon. Tevens sprak hij over het ontstaan van het personage en waarom deze met CGI tot leven komt:

“When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance.

Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful. Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.

The scale of him, for instance, is one reason. He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design — you couldn’t have gotten there with prosthetics. It’s too extreme. Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure. You could never have done it [in real life].”

Serkis werd ingehuurd omdat hij veel ervaring heeft met de motion capture-techniek. Zo was hij verantwoordelijk voor Gollum in Lord of the Rings en Caesar in de twee Planet of the Apes-reboots.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens werd geregisseerd door J.J. Abrams en draait nu in de bioscoop. Hoofdrollen zijn er voor Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver,Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong’o, Gwendoline Christie en Max von Sydow.