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FILE - In this July 21, 2011 file photo, actor Andy Serkis poses for a portrait at Comic Con in San Diego, Calif. Serkis stars in the upcoming film, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." (AP Photo/Dan Steinberg, file)

"I don't think there's such a thing as a performance-capture or motion-capture actor," Andy Serkis says. "Any actor can do it. I've just embraced it, is all."

Indeed he has. The 47-year-old English actor still makes a mark in the occasional "face time" role, starring as rocker Ian Drury in "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" and doing loads of supporting characters on the big and small screen. But he is "the king of performance capture," says David Germaine of the Associated Press.

Serkis pretty much invented the sort of acting with his groundbreaking turn as Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" movies. He played the great ape King Kong, has two roles in this winter's performance-capture animated "The Adventures of Tintin," and is reprising Gollum in Peter Jackson's two-part film of "The Hobbit." And Serkis is the simian hero in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," which opened Friday.

For each performance, Serkis dons a dot-covered suit and has dots painted on his face. Computers and computers "capture" his performance, which is then animated. Serkis calls this "digital makeup," and notes how much more expressive and subtle it is than the rubber prosthetics and masks that actresses from Kim Hunter to Helena Bonham Carter have had to wear to play apes in the earlier films.

In a decade of doing performance capture work, Serkis says that "the technology has become more transparent, more elegant. The most significant change between the first time I donned the suit is that we can now shoot all my scenes on the set with the other actors. So now, instead of acting with the other actors and then going off ... to shoot the performance-capture work at a later date, I can do it all in one hit. It has that intimacy and immediacy, the alchemy between actors on the set is back. They're reacting to the real me."


In "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," Serkis plays Caesar, a chimpanzee given a drug that makes him super-intelligent. He lives with humans until that fateful day when he is torn from his "family," and once penned up among the apes, he figures out how to lead them in revolt.

Caesar has "a fascinating arc, as a character, since I get to play him from childhood until the revolt," Serkis says. And because Serkis already had played a gorilla, "I'd already done a lot of the primate research I needed to figure out their movements, posture. When I played Kong, I spent a lot of time in zoos, and I went to Rwanda to study mountain gorillas. And when I was in Rwanda, I was lucky enough to literally hang out with a young orphan chimpanzee."

He wore arm extensions to get his body closer to a chimp's shape and rehearsed the physicality of the role. "And once you've learned how to calibrate your movements to the computer-generated puppet of Caesar ... you can start to think about the character -- who he is and how he might think."

Serkis says that performance-capture acting work "is liberating, because you're both the puppet and the puppeteer." That makes him want to share what he knows with others. He's starting a motion-capture studio for filmmakers and an academy for performance capture actors in London. The Imaginarium will emphasize "that this is a filmmaking tool," not a "genre of acting. I think of it as digital makeup, really, not as a genre."

Lesson 1 in his Performance Capture 101 class? "You don't have to over-pantomime the emotions you're portraying. Trust the technology. It's very sensitive. Everything that you're feeling will come through. You don't have to pull faces."

And Lesson 2? "You have to create an internal physical energy beyond which you can't drop. You have to be more in the moment that ever. You can't just limply stand there.