The biggest star you’ve never seen: Andy Serkis makes his directing debut with Breathe, a love story about a polio patient

Serkis has played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Caesar in Planet of the Apes and Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars. Now he has directed his first film, the story of his friend’s father, who caught polio as a young man

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Actor and director Andy Serkis. Photo: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

Published: 12:00pm, 28 Nov 2017Updated: 7:21pm, 29 Nov 2017

Andy Serkis is known for his groundbreaking motion capture portrayals, as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit franchises, the gigantic 150-year-old gorilla in King Kong, and as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy. He will next be seen via performance capture in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, reprising his role as Supreme Leader Snoke, the mysterious ruler of the First Order.

Andy Serkis plays the lead character Caesar via motion capture in War for the Planet of the Apes.

It seemed natural that after his stint as second unit director on The Hobbit films, London-born Serkis, who originally trained as a visual artist, would become a director in his own right.

With his version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, a mix of live action and performance capture, he was seemingly realising that dream. But when Disney’s 2016 live action/CGI version came along and his film was put back to 2018, nobody ever imagined that his feature directing debut would ultimately be Breathe.

Andrew Garfield as Robin Cavendish and Claire Foy as Diana Cavendish in a still from Breathe.

A romantic, comedy-laced tear-jerker that happens to be entirely true, the film tells the story of resilient polio victim Robin Cavendish and his wife Diana, the parents of Jonathan Cavendish (a producer of the Bridget Jones films), as well as Serkis’ close friend and business partner in Imaginarium Productions.

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“At Imaginarium we have a slate of film and TV, video game and virtual reality projects, all with the idea of combining new technology and next generation storytelling,” Serkis says of the studio that since 2011 has worked on blockbusters such as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the latest Star Wars films, and which also has a dramatic arm.