THE TRANSFORMER
IN THE BASEMENT CONFERENCE ROOM OF an upmarket West London hotel, a dozen actors and stuntpeople are charging around on all fours like damn dirty apes. The smell of sweat hangs in the air as they pound the carpet with the short, black crutches they’re using to extend their arms to simian lengths. Their teacher, a square-jawed man of 5’ 7” with expressive eyes, raises himself upright. “Now you’re tapping back into your roots,” says Terry Notary, encouragingly. “This is how we were designed.”
When he’s not running movement workshops like this one, Notary is one of the world’s leading performance-capture performers. Having started as an acrobat with Cirque du Soleil, he gracefully tumbled into acting when he was cast alongside other circus artists in Ron Howard’s 2000 film How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Notary took it upon himself to ensure all his fellow Whoville inhabitants moved in a consistent way. “Ron walked past and said, ‘I like what he’s doing,’” remembers Notary. “That’s how I got started as a movement coach.”
From there it was just a hop, skip and a performance-captured jump to providing the movements for a string of animals, aliens and monsters in Hollywood blockbusters ranging from and to and . Usually cloaked behind CGI, Notary’s most visible onscreen role to date came in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 art-world satire , in which he played a performance artist whose gorilla impersonation
