(Photo: Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox)

The 47-year-old Brit actor is not computer-generated, though his fame sort of is. Serkis was hardly a marquee star and doing a lot of TV (Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist) when he got the job as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films—the very good actor behind the special effects. This year, he played Caesar, the rebel simian in The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. For the CGI roles, he wears a skintight Lycra suit, his face covered in motion-tracking dots. “It’s funny, people don’t seem to have any problem with actors who dress up or wear makeup that completely hides their face, but when it comes to doing that in the digital realm, there’s still almost a Luddite approach to it,” he says. “It’s not some sort of stand-in activity. The actor playing a role in performance capture is really delivering what they would in a live-action film.” This winter, Serkis was back in high-tech Lycra for The Adventures of Tintin.

Related:

• Archive: “Movie Features”
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