HOBBITUARY: ANDY SERKIS

Don’t let that headline alarm you: there’s plenty of life left in Andy Serkis, a man who has spent the past two decades inadvertently redefining screen acting. Not that he’ll take any credit for doing so. “I think of myself as being like the lucky guy who gets to sit in a Formula One car and drive it while a million other people do all the work to get you into that seat,” Serkis tells The Rake, his trademark cheery modesty coming across loud and clear via Zoom.

With the average Hollywood blockbuster film crew currently teetering at around 600, his intentionally hyperbolic analogy works for pretty much any major movie actor, though not quite as well as it works for Andy Serkis. Because Andy Serkis — in a role that has been described as the biggest technical advance in screen acting since brought synchronised sound to cinemagoers in 1927