Despite a barrage of Star Wars: The Force Awakens news nuggets hitting the Internet over the past weeks and months, there remains a handful of tantalizing secrets that have fuelled enough speculation and impassioned debates to keep us all ticking over until that fabled December 18 release date – and then some!
Aside from Luke Skywalker’s whereabouts and intentions, arguably the most pertinent among them is the identity and indeed appearance of one Supreme Leader Snoke, the all-powerful nemesis that will be brought to life by Andy Serkis. But as revealed within Entertainment Weekly’s exhaustive coverage, not even the performance capture maestro has laid eyes on the final form of Snoke.
Outside of the image above that showcases a glowering Serkis kitted out with motion capture equipment, there hasn’t been a single image released of the actor’s digital creation. And according to the man himself, that secrecy extends right down to the set of The Force Awakens.
“It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean talk about secrecy! When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance.”
Interestingly, it would appear that Supreme Leader Snoke has evolved throughout production, meaning that even the early artwork that surfaced isn’t really indicative of what we’ll be seeing on the big screen in only a few weeks’ time. In fact, those incremental changes continued long after principal photography.
“We shot on set of course, and I was in the scenes I have with other actors, but the beauty of this process is you can go back and reiterate, keep informing and honing beats and moments,” Serkis says. “So J.J., after we shot last year, we’ve had a series of sessions where I’d be in London at The Imaginarium, my studio, while he’s been directing from L.A., and we’ve literally been creating further additions and iterations to the character. That’s been fascinating. And in the meantime I’ve been able to see the look and design of the character grow and change as the performances change. So it’s been really exciting in that respect.”
Star Wars: The Force Awakens lands on December 18 in North America.
