Actor Andy Serkis sheds the special effects to emerge as a new kind of animal in British drama Sugarhouse. Alison Jones reports.
Andy Serkis is accustomed to playing monsters. He essayed the cadaverous, jewellery-obsessed half-Hobbit Gollum in Lord of the Rings and the giant love-lorn ape in King Kong.
For his latest role, he at least gets to appear human on screen although his character in Sugarhouse, Hoodwink, is every bit as monstrous.
A former UDA terrorist, he uses his propensity for aggression to control the drugs trade on the nameless London estate where he lives.
However, Andy didn't escape the make-up artist's chair as Hoodwink's personal history of violence is inked on to his skin, so he had to have guns and even the red hand of Ulster painstakingly stencilled onto his body using temporary dyes - each session taking 20 hours.
"This really lovely couple from Manchester did it using Jaguar fruit ink. They painted it on and then ripped it off. All down my legs and up to my backside. It was agony actually because most of the hair came off."
The fact that the 43-year-old actor normally sports a lustrous quiff that normally increases his 5ft 8in height by several more inches hints at just how painful the process must have been.
The luxuriant mop is also gone in Sugarhouse as Hoodwink is a skinhead, which only adds to his visual ferocity.
"I got my kids to do that while we were on holiday," reveals Andy, who has three children, Sonny, Ruby and Louis, with his wife, True Dare Kiss actress Lorraine Ashbourne.
"We had this ritual one day of just having a go with the shaver and they just shaved it off. They quite enjoyed that."
Sugarhouse is a low-budget British drama, adapted by Dominic Leyton from his play Collision and directed by former TV actor Gary Love.
It stars Steven Mackintosh as an outwardly affluent but inwardly tormented city worker who is attempting to buy a gun from strung-out junkie D, played by one time So Solid Crew member Ashley Waters.
The owner of the gun, Hoodwink, wants its back and doesn't care how much blood he sheds to get it.
"He is a beast of a man," agrees Andy. "When he was functioning in the UDA he had a belief system, his violence was used in a political way. He was part of a brethren who believed they could achieve something through terrorism.
"Having come here (London) he is isolated. He's lost his belief system and has become this über capitalist, a sort of survival of the fittest Darwinian thug.
"People have said he is a bit pantomime-ised but he's based on a couple of people that Gary knows personally and that I know.
"I'm always amazed there isn't more violence in London quite frankly. It's only a hair's breadth away most of the time. People like Hoodwink are part of humanity, we can choose to disassociate ourselves, pretend they are not there, but they are."
Hoodwink is a barely contained bundle of rage, in spite of his pregnant wife's attempts to manage his anger by having him chant mantras.
In one scene, Andy was called on to destroy the interior of a lift with a machete and went at it so hard he couldn't physically move afterwards.
And in another when a co-actor decided to deviate from the script and challenge Hoodwink, Andy found himself correcting him rather forcefully.
"I was absolutely wired to get the scene right and I was pinning them all up against a garage door and Teddy, this really enthusiastic young actor, sort of fronted my character which I didn't think he would ever have done.
"I couldn't control myself, I grabbed him and shoved him on the floor and I just started smacking him saying 'Are you f****** fronting up the Hoody?'.
"Then suddenly he was gone, vanished. He'd gone round the corner and he was crying. I said 'look mate we are just acting, it gets a bit rough' and he was okay. That was just the rehearsal but I felt it established the state of the character.
"Then on the last day, Teddy came up to me in the dressing room and he said 'I really respect you and I've loved working with you, do you mind if I just do this?'.
"I said 'Yeah, what?' and, bang, he smacked me as hard as he could around the face. I went 'I've really enjoyed working with you too'."
The shoestring project was filmed almost entirely in the claustrophobic confines of a warehouse in 24 days. The lack of cash meant the cast could not relax in personal trailers between takes but had to stay on set in the mock crack den.
The intense yet malleable Serkis has been called on to work on blockbuster movies, including Stormbreaker, The Prestige and the romcom 13 Going On 30 - where he did Michael Jackson's Thriller dance - as well as high profile TV projects like Longford, in which he played Ian Brady.
Reassuringly for Gary Love, Andy doesn't judge a job by its perks or per diems: "Whatever I am doing at any given time I always think it is the best thing I have ever done or am doing".
The tight-knit set and time constraints meant there was no room for prima donnas, not a stunt the hard-working Andy would ever consider pulling having been embarrassed to witness examples of it while working abroad.
"I won't mention names but I was involved in a film, it was classic big shot actor having a resurgence in his career who had big tantrums. Went and sat in his trailer for hours, crew sat around doing nothing, had his drug dealer around, prostitutes on the set, all that kind of lark, wasting people's time and just generally being despicable and horrible really.
"There was a real equality across Sugarhouse. There was no chance of anyone throwing any kind of hissy fit, it was a fantastic environment to work in."
Andy took the opportunity to study Gary's approach to directing as he is soon to start work behind the camera.
"I'm not seeking to drop acting by any stretch but there are a couple of projects that have been brewing over the last couple of years. One is based on the Steven Smith book Addict and there's a film called Dark Blue Rising which a friend of mine Patrick Viragh has written and hopefully that is going to be made relatively soon."
He also hopes directing will enable him to make more use of his visual arts degree from Lancaster University.
The son of an Armenian doctor - until Andy was ten, the family shuttled back and forth between Baghdad and London - he grew up wanting to be an artist.
He fell into acting while working as a set designer and builder, establishing himself first in the theatre in productions like Mojo before turning to television and feature films.
"I suppose I am more compelled to work in film than television because of that sense of working with people who are passionate about their particular project. Television does get caught in that terrible trap, you become a bit of a functionary as a TV director because it is not your vision," says Andy.
"I've always wanted to be a storyteller from the outside as well as within."
* Sugarhouse is on at cinemas from August 25.
