In the early 20th century, star of stage and screen Lon Chaney became known as "The Man of a Thousand Faces" thanks to his ground-breaking and transformative make-up techniques. His disguises, as incredible as they were, worked perhaps too well, distracting audiences and history's archivists from Chaney's many and varied performances as an actor first and an effects whiz second. In short, Chaney's abilities as an actor were overshadowed by his own technological brilliance and overlooked by everyone who was wowed by his make-up techniques. Nearly a century later, Andy Serkis faces a similar challenge.

Though the English actor has been in the business since the late 80s, Serkis came to the world stage in Peter Jackson's epic early 2000s trilogy adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. But it wasn't Serkis' face that audiences came to know and love. It was that of the twisted and malformed creature Gollum, a computer-generated creation that came to life through Serkis' "blood, sweat, and tears" performance well before it was cloaked in a textured digital skin. The bright side for Serkis was that a whole new world of possibilities through motion-capture and performance-capture opened up in front of him; the downside was that his most famous creations would wear a face that wasn't his own.

Since Gollum, Serkis has taken on the roles of a giant gorilla, a not-so-sober sea captain, a rapidly evolving chimpanzee, and a (supposedly) powerful Force-wielder, among others. His latest performance-captured role is Baloo the bear in Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, a Netflix film which Serkis also directed, following up on his 2017 directorial debut, Breathe. In honor of Mowgli's arrival, I took a look back at Serkis' other "captured" roles to see how far he's come along with the technology, and to see where it might take him next.

Before we get into the ranking of Serkis' performances, check out this featurette for Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle which goes behind the scenes of the Netflix film to show off the actor-director's on-set talents:

"It was absolutely essential that we use performance capture to create the animals." Hear from Andy Serkis and the cast about the magical transformation from performance capture to the stunning world of Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle.

Supreme Leader Snoke in the New 'Star Wars' Films

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Of all of Serkis' captured performances, his mysterious Star Wars character Supreme Leader Snoke accounts for the least screen time and easily the least impact on a story overall. Visually, the Force-wielding leader of the First Order is as grotesque as he is deceptive, appearing as an old and bent figure despite the incredible power he has at his command. Appearing briefly in The Force Awakens as a towering, gigantic hologram projection (one of many smoke-and-mirrors deceptions to accompany this character), Serkis' Snoke appeared in the flesh in The Last Jedi. As Serkis himself told Empire, bringing the sizable Snoke to life was "quite an unusual situation":

"My first day was basically standing on a 25-foot podium doing Lord Snoke without the faintest idea what he looked like... or in fact who he was! I was very high up, totally on my own, away from everybody else, but acting with them."

But after a few relatively short displays of power compared to his franchise counterparts on the Dark Side, Snoke was ultimately dispatched by a trick of the mind and some sleight of hand. So passed Serkis' Star Wars character, one who arrived with much promise but departed with more than a little disappointment.

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Image via Lucasfilm

While the performance itself might have been cut short, Serkis' involvement with the film was anything but. Co-star Lupita Nyong'o, who played the performance-capture character Maz Kanata in the new films, had her first run in a Pcap rig in The Force Awakens. Serkis was on hand to coach her through the process at his digital studio, The Imaginarium, a place that's become a sort of Mecca for productions of all sorts that require digitally captured performances. In speaking with EW, Nyong'o said of Serkis' advice:

“The biggest advice he gave me, that was so important to hold on to, is a motion-capture character you develop the same way as any other. You have to understand who the character is and what makes them who they are.”

Serkis is a sort of motion-capture missionary, hoping to convert naysayers on both sides of the camera and the screen that the technology merely enhances and enriches the performance that's at the heart of the character.

Baloo in 'Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle'

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While Baloo the bear may be Serkis' latest performance-captured role, it's also the one that slips furthest down into the Uncanny Valley. Most of the performances in Mowgli accurately transform the incredible cast--featuring Christian Bale, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Cate Blanchett among others--into their animal counterparts, but Baloo's design just feels off. Maybe it's the too-human eyes, maybe its the receding hairline and furrowed brow (an odd look for bear that gives Baloo the appearance of suffering from mange), but this one just isn't Serkis' or The Imaginarium's best.

That being said, Serkis' direction for the rest of his performance-captured cast is impeccable. Bale's Bagheera slinks through the jungle with grace, and his voice work complements the panther's prowling. Equal to the task, Blanchett delivers a hypnotic performance as the slithering Kaa, and Cumberbatch's bloodthirsty Shere Khan is an absolute monster, more menacing than the actor's other on-screen villains in a performance that Serkis called "incredibly physical" during a chat with CNet. Cumberbatch and Serkis had collaborated before on The Hobbit films in which the former took on the performance-captured role of Smaug, in addition to playing the Necromancer. Hopefully there's more capturing to come in this duo's filmmaking future.

Captain Haddock in 'The Adventures of Tintin'

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For as much motion-capture work as Serkis has done, I'm amazed he hasn't been involved in more animated fare. It's a much more forgiving medium than live-action, especially in highly stylized films like 2011's The Adventures of Tintin. In this Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation of Hergé's beloved tale, Serkis portrays the often drunk sea captain, Archibald Haddock, along with his ancestor Sir Francis Haddock. So while the pipe-smoking pal of the title character, who was brought to life by Jamie Bell in his first motion-capture performance, get second billing, Haddock is still a serviceable role in Serkis' filmography.

Like many if not all of these examples, Serkis shares his experience in the field of performance-capture filmmaking with those around him. These partnerships not only help to grow the appreciation of the technology and push its boundaries, they also bring about fruits of their labor in other projects. After their time together on Tintin, and years after starring together in both 2002's Death Watch and 2005's King Kong, Serkis and Bell collaborated once more for 2015's Fantastic Four in which the latter actor played Ben Grimm / The Thing. Here's what he had to say during a Q&A with AOL Build (via Huffington Post) about Serkis' teachings:

“Obviously I’m not made of rocks and obviously I’m not 6 foot 8! It’s about capturing the essence of a human being inside of that character when he is transformed and you do that through motion capture. It’s a technique that my friend Andy Serkis has very much spearheaded — he is the guru of performance capture. I’ve been lucky to work with him three or four times actually, so I very much consider him my mentor.”

The good news for Tintin fans is that there are supposedly two more films on the horizon. Whether or not Serkis returns as Haddock in those movies remains to be seen, but you can rest assured that, should the productions feature performance-capture once more, he'll be on board in a consulting capacity at the very least.

King Kong

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Peter Jackson's three-time Oscar winner King Kong features one of the best performances of Serkis' career and is perhaps the one that's most overlooked. The 2005 retelling of the 1933 stop-motion classic is a force of nature, a rare adventure film that delivers incredible scope and scale but also takes the time to focus in on the very human emotion at the heart of the story, even if those emotions aren't restricted to human characters at all. Serkis' King Kong is arguably his most human performance, even when factoring in his many live-action roles; sorry, Lumpy. He's helped, of course, by the award-winning Weta Digital team and by the incredible performance of Naomi Watts, but Serkis absolutely disappears into the role of a 25-foot-gorilla who's as imposing while defending his jungle domain as he is impressively playful while ice skating in New York City. Bizarrely, it's also Serkis' only role without any dialogue, making it all the more impressive that he delivers a nuanced performance that ranges from pensive to primal.

Here's a look behind the scenes of all the work that went into bringing King Kong to life:

In a chat with Vulture, Serkis made it clear that it was the chance to play King Kong after three films playing Gollum that triggered the revelation that motion-capture and performance-capture gave him an incredible artistic license:

“The funny thing is, after I finished playing Gollum, I thought I’d just go back to my normal life as a regular actor, and then literally, when Peter asked me to play King Kong, it was this huge kind of, ‘God, it’s the end of type casting! I’ve just been playing a three-and-a-half-foot Hobbit. Now, I’m playing a 25-foot gorilla.’ It means that this technology allows you to play anything.”

Gollum in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit'

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Easily the most iconic role for Serkis so far, the part of the pathetic and obsessed Gollum will go down in history as a character we love to hate and hate to love. Serkis played the role over the course of four films, from Jackson's original The Lord of the Rings trilogy to the prequel film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; Serkis also acted as a second unit director in all three Hobbit films. The collaboration between Jackson and Serkis not only altered the course of both their careers but also started a whole new evolutionary branch of filmmaking technology that's still in its infancy today.

It's difficult to overstate how important Serkis' portrayal of Gollum actually is because we've yet to see just how far motion-capture and performance-capture technology can go. It's still growing. It's still being used in movies and video games, and with each new production, the technology gets better, more efficient, and offers a more diverse toolkit. The tech may not have started with Gollum, but its use in bringing the duplicitous character to life certain brought it to the world stage. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes featurette showing Serkis as Gollum to see how far the technology has come in the nearly 20 years since:

As powerful a performance as Serkis' delivered as Gollum, a performance that will long be beloved by fans but sadly unremarked by awards-givers, it's worth noting the other contributions that he gave to The Lord of the Rings films. Serkis gets the opportunity to show his actual face in flashbacks as Smeagol, before he de-evolved into Gollum. But it might surprise you to learn that he also voiced the Witch King of Angmar in The Fellowship of the Ring and a pair of orcs, Snaga and Mauhúr. But it's Gollum the people will remember, and Gollum that Serkis owes a great deal to ... and yet it's not his greatest performance to date.

Caesar in the 'Planet of the Apes' Trilogy

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This list certainly has its share of superlatives, but for me, Serkis' three-film performance as the chimpanzee Caesar is the crowning achievement of both his career and Weta Digital's technology. Over the course of 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and 2017's War for the Planet of the Apes, Serkis takes the character from a mute but incredibly intellectually gifted and emotionally expressive chimp to a fully voiced leader of a war band who can go toe to toe with human characters both in terms of action and philosophy. It's an incredible character arc from beginning to end, one that blends Serkis and Caesar into an inseparable being.

One of the biggest leaps forward in the technology used for Rise was the ability to take the performance-captured actors out of the soundstage and into the real world, interacting with real props and natural lighting. Serkis spoke about this advantage in a chat with Vulture:

“We shot some out on the streets of San Francisco, but a lot took place in the house Caesar was brought up in, the lab facility where they kept him,” Serkis says. “So that was amazing: to be able to play on real physical sets and interact with real proper props, and all of that would be captured.”

Throughout the franchise, the performance-captured apes not only interact with each other and their live-action human counterparts, they also ride on horses (both live-action and computer-generated doubles), and acted opposite digital animals such as elk and grizzly bears, while also appearing en masse in epic battle sequences. This trilogy really is a culmination of Serkis' solo efforts and Weta Digital's overall effects work so far, and you can see how far the collaborators have come by checking out featuretts from the three successive films:

Though Fox gave Serkis' performance as Caesar an awards push for Oscar season, and though the film franchise did encourage some organizations to reconsider their awards categories, ultimately nothing came of it, not in the actual winning of an Oscar anyway. It will continue to baffle me how audiences, critics, and awards-givers alike are unable to see the performance beneath the digital make-up or to separate the two in their minds. Maybe it's a lack of an understanding of the whole process or the misguided belief that "it's all done in the computers", but until that prejudice changes, expect a lot more Oscars for "Visual Effects" or "Make-up" and a lack of recognition for Serkis and his ilk. Sadly, I'd be willing to wager that Serkis nets himself a Lifetime Achievement Award before the Academy seriously considers awarding a Best Actor Oscar for a performance-captured role.

What's Next?

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Image via Netflix

Serkis, in his chat with Vulture, is still a missionary of sorts for performance-capture technology, attempting to overcome the stigma that's unfairly or unconsciously attached to the tech that distracts from the performance underneath it:

“The choices, the in-the-moment decisions that you make as an actor, the expression, the emotion, the soul of the character, is authored by the actor. It’s not animation driven. It’s not a committee of animators deciding what the character is doing. It’s one actor who is on set working with a director from page 1 to 120. Working on the character and becoming that emotional guiding point for and the facilitator and author of the role.”

In the aforementioned chat with CNet, Serkis spoke about what's next in the arena of performance-capture technology:

The next stage is going to be is full facial real-time capture: very highly evolved, photorealistic retargeting of your facial expressions onto a character or a human face that's totally believable without any post-processing. That's really the holy grail at the moment. It's on the way. It's just not production-ready at the moment; it involves being stationary. Once you're untethered and once the information is caught on a head-mounted camera -- and is then real-time -- that's going to change everything. You'll be able to produce content straight out of the box. You'll film the actor and you will have content that's good enough to be screened, pretty much.

Expect big things from Serkis in the years to come.

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Image via Netflix