here is no doubt Andy Serkis is unique. What other actor can go from playing a creepy character such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, to the gay head of a women's style magazine in 13 Going On 30 and finally end up as a 25 foot, 800 pound silverback gorilla in King Kong? Now if that isn't a career in and of itself then I don't know what is.

Thanks to Peter Jackson Andy has transformed himself from hobbit, to Gollum, to Lumpy the cook to King Kong, but when taking on such a massive role as King Kong Serkis had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was the Regents Park Zoo in London.

"I spent two months at the London Zoo with the four gorillas there, the three females and one male. One of the females was called Zaire who I particularly formed a relationship with... then I had the chance to go out to Rwanda and seeing them in the wild is just another thing altogether."

Serkis continued, "You're watching them in groups now, and you see the whole structure and hierarchy of a family in operation. I was with the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund International who monitor their welfare and they're habituated gorillas so they are used to human beings, but they didn't know me. They spotted me immediately as the odd man in the group because they hadn't seen me before. They were very curious with me. I didn't feel so much in danger because I had been grilled in etiquette and how to respond, but there was a charge by one silverback that took me so by surprise because they are so fast. There's very little warning, it's all in the eyes and they overt their gaze and then suddenly they're off. Then they stand their ground and they're very rigid and they strut and rise up and beat their chest. They beat their chest with open hands instead of clenched closed fists which is what they did in the original King Kong because they have inflated chest sacks, which when they hoot opens up and it sounds like a drum and they beat their hands 17 times a second. It's all bluff, it's all display unless you transgress that."

With his studying done it was time to bring Kong to life and much like they did with the Polar Express facial motion capture was used to capture every element of Andy's performance a process unlike what was done with Gollum on Lord of the Rings.

"With Gollum my performance was shot with 35mm film and the facial animators copied my expressions, key frame animated that. With this it was directly from the 132 markers on my face, which then drove the CG face of Kong and of course the animators then enhanced that and augmented the lower muzzle movement. The eyes particularly represent the acting choices I made and the whole physicality of the way that Kong is and the way his personality is portrayed through performance capture."

Taking all that into consideration was Kong more difficult than Gollum?

"Immensely more difficult," Andy said. "So much of Gollum was his voice and the way he spoke and the character kind of emanated because he's called Gollum because of the way he sounds and the physicality came out of the voice and I had to get myself into physical positions to make that voice really work. He explains that to other people, his predicament, and talks to himself with very rich dialogue from Tolkien and from Philippa Boyen and Fran Walsh and that was one of the biggest challenges of how we were going to convey that range from emotions with a mute character like Kong. But once I started researching gorillas and I found out they sing, they chuckle, they have very specific ways of communicating within a group."

Andy found his motivation for Kong while exploring the relationship the great ape has with Ann Darrow, "The range of emotions and the experimentation with finding who this personality was is unlocked by Ann. He as a character is transformed by her and years and years and years of this suppressed socialized behavior that he has with the sacrifices that are put over the wall to him are broken. The cycle is broken with her and he is free to a certain extent. Although he then becomes slightly disempowered by her."

On top of playing Kong in the film Serkis also plays the role of the Venture's on board cook Lumpy, a role as noticeable as any other as he does everything with a cigarette in his mouth and one eye closed. It is a role Serkis was able to make much larger than it should have been thanks to the enormous amount of character he is able to portray on the screen. Something as simple as smoking a cigarette plays a part in his character's appearance.

"He has spent years cooking and smoking a cigarette at the same time and it's just that the smoke always goes in that one eye."

As far as being labeled the Motion Capture Man, Serkis sees nothing different between traditional acting and his new found talent.

"I don't see the difference between flesh and blood and motion capture, for me acting is acting and what I've done with Gollum and Kong is no different to any other character I've ever played. It's all to do with character and script. If someone was to come up to me and say, 'Here is a great CG role,' and I read it and I thought the script's amazing and it's a CG role it wouldn't make any difference to me."

King Kong opens everywhere on December 14, 2005.