Andy Serkis

Certain gorillas are more evolved than certain human beings I know.

I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he's very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.

I do listen to myself sometimes and think, 'Is my moral compass so easily swayed by the characters I play, or is it me growing as a human being?'

I have a road bike and a mountain bike, and I tend to use them both a lot. They help you keep your balance and your stamina.

I think the actors in 'Greystoke' were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who's, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.

Having done a lot of theater, I'm used to sustaining characters over long periods of time.

J.J. Abrams is an all-time hero of mine, really lovely to be working with him.

My very, very first moment on set on 'Lord of the Rings' in 2000 was me in a lycra suit, six and a half thousand feet up on a mountain in New Zealand, standing in front of 250 crew who were all wondering what I was doing - myself included.

I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.

An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.