Though we’ve seen the full-length trailer several times by now, it’s still unclear which character Andy Serkis will be playing in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Nevertheless, given the actor’s reputable skill in a mo-cap suit, he has also been on set advising the superhero sequel’s key players in the art of performance capture, and Serkis himself outlined his contribution in a recent interview with Empire.
“We did some work on Ultron. On the development of Ultron before James Spader came on board. In terms of movement styles: was he gonna be human-like? Was he going to be robot-like? So we worked with a bunch of different people, from body-popping experts to dancers, to this guy called Neil who’s nearly eight feet tall…”
Unsurprisingly, given his eye-catching work on the 20th Century Fox’s Planet of the Apes films, Serkis also had a thing or two to offer to Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner when it comes to portraying a primal, animalistic rage.
“We gave Mark weights, we had voice projections so he could do his Hulk roar,” he explains. “On screen we could have a virtual representation of the low-res avatar of The Hulk, so he could come out and feel that sense of scale.”
Andy Serkis is currently working on his own directorial debut, Jungle Book: Origins, which has recruited quite the ensemble cast in Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale. It’s due to release at some point in 2016. Circling back to the superhero genre, though, Joss Whedon’s hotly-anticipated Avengers: Age of Ultron will blast into theaters on May 1st, 2015.
