Andy Serkis

For me, I've never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.

Actors' performances do not stand alone in any film, live action or whatever.

I'd like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.

We've never had nannies. We've had great grandparents, great support from family, and the kids have been on every set: they've seen me play Gollum, King Kong, Captain Haddock, the lot. They totally get it, and they want to go into the business. Ruby, my daughter, is very keen to become an actress.

If it was a great script and a great character, I would love to do a romantic comedy.

Did you happen to catch the film I did between 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Kong?' It was a nice little Jennifer Garner comedy, '13 Going on 30,' and I play her boss. In my big scene, I get to moonwalk - pretty well, I thought - to Michael Jackson.

When you do animation - well, straightforward animation, although it's not straightforward - the voice for a character or something, they're always singular experiences, really.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, 'God, they don't paint behind the sets.' It's a bit of a shame, really - 'Oh, what's on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.' I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid.

Performance capture, for me, is finding the essence of a performance.

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.

I believe that when people experience an event as a community, it can transcend and change people's lives.