He has played some of the most iconic characters in cinema — Gollum, Caesar and King Kong. Now he’s the director of the animated feature adaptation of George Orwell’s iconic Animal Farm, in theaters May 1st. Emmy and BAFTA winner Andy Serkis joins me for this Animation Scoop Q&A. (This Interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Congratulations on the film. I screened it recently through Angel. I have colleagues who saw it at Annecy last June. Really enjoyed it. How does it feel to finally have this out there?

Andy Serkis: I cannot tell you the sheer excitement I’m feeling right now that we are gonna have this movie out on May the 1st. It is a joy. It’s been a long haul, been a long process for everyone involved, and I’m just really thrilled. I’m not expecting everybody to like it. In some ways, I hope they don’t, because Orwell would’ve wanted it that way. He was writing something that was gonna cause a debate. And that’s what this film’s all about.

JM: Yeah, it is. I really liked it. I love how you dive into the commentary. That’s one of the fascinating things about this is sharing the commentary of this story with families of the here and now in 2026. What were some of the challenges of that for you?

AS: I read this book, like most people, when they’re about 11 or 12. It’s the one of the first few adult books, along with C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, by the way, where you start to engage with darker themes, with adult themes, through a sort of level of allegory and fantasy. It stuck with me. It really hit me hard. The character Boxer and the journey that he goes on really stayed with me. Then when we were making… 30 years later when I was making the “Planet of the Apes: movies, and Caesar was rebelling and freeing all the apes from the facility where they’d all been kept, I thought, “There hasn’t been an adaptation of Orwell’s Book, Animal Farm, for years now, and this is now the time.” I really thought that would be my directorial debut, and that would be the first on the slate of our new company — and do it as a performance captured movie. But then it became clear that it would’ve inevitably been a much darker movie, and we wanted to take it to a broad audience. Orwell wrote this for young minds to receive, so we decided to go down an animation route, and I’m really glad that we did.

JM: It looks fantastic. And I love the connection to Caesar with that. That makes so much sense, with the power of that character and the power of this story. You’re part of the voice ensemble of this, along with Seth Rogen, Jim Parsons, Laverne Cox and Woody Harrelson. Their voice performances and yours are so good because there’s a lot of key timing moments and inflection moments with the commentary and the messaging. How was it through what you do and what they do with the key moments of this?

AS: It started with working with Nick Stoller, the screenwriter. We’d done various drafts of the script, and we weren’t quite getting the balance of humor and pathos. And that was the most important thing. Then Nick delivered a killer script and we just thought, “Okay, now we can take it to the actors and they can em embellish and they can grow with it and they can bring their own magic to it.” And that was the case when you are working with the likes of Seth. He was just immaculate as Napoleon. There were some actors that we went to literally 12 years ago when we first started making it who stayed with the project all that time until it came into life and came into being, with Aniventure. They were just incredible, and their sister company Cinesite, who did all of the animation. Once we started to work with them on designing it and we had a very strong idea of the cast that we wanted, then it was the fun of working with each individual actor in the booth and letting them bring their magic. And they all did. Some extraordinary performances. From Seth… the great performance of Boxer by Woody Harrelson. Kathleen Turner as Benjamin and Laverne Cox. Everyone who is in it. Gaten Matarazzo is this young, innocent piglet [Lucky] who takes us through the whole story on his journey. Iman Vellani. It’s an embarrassment of riches actually, in terms of actors.

JM: Incredible cast. Great work that you all do. Animation is filled with freedom, but there are also rules in order to protect the medium. And this movie focuses so much about freedom and rules. So how did those apply when it came to making “Animal Farm”?

AS: I intended it originally to be performance capture driven and by actors, live-action on set. So I had to learn a new discipline. But there were three key things that I wanted to bring from the live-action world into our movie, one of which was the lighting references and the way the look of the film, which were all based on live-action movies like “Days of Heaven” and “Witness”. Sort of bucolic. beautiful, golden hour lighting. We very carefully chose our lighting references. And the second was the animation style — not to be too cartoony, that the animals were definitely moved physically like the animals that they were representing and not overly animated. And I spent a long time with the animators working on close-ups and getting them to do less and less so that the audience could do the work in trying to get inside the heads of the characters. Which brings me to camera and talking to the camera department and saying, “I don’t really want this camera to move anywhere that a physical, real live-action camera couldn’t move.” So no big sweeping, great big wizzy CG moves… It was grounded by a real sense of live-action cinematography.

JM: You’re right about the lighting and everything that went into this for sure. Some of the other animation projects you’ve been a part of throughout your career [include] “The Adventures of Tintin”, “Flushed Away” and “Mowgli” — with motion-capture, and this [CG] form of animation here, you have been so influential in the medium and the art form. What is the genesis of that for you? Do you have early memories of a love of animation and this kind of incredible storytelling?

AS: I started out life having no intentions of being an actor. I wanted to paint. I picked up a paintbrush when I was very, very young, about seven years old. I was given a set of oil paints, actually, and I just really loved to tell stories visually. So that was where it sort of stems from. And then I only ever made one very, very basic sort of stop-motion… a 2D character that you just moved the arms of. But I painted all the different versions of the character, different facial expressions. I remember doing that at school. But I knew I loved watching animation and I found it incredibly affecting. All of the early Disney films I adored. And then of course growing older and watching Pixar movies and so on. I’ve always seen it as this extraordinary portal into being able to tell human truths in a fabulistic and allegorical way. And so that’s why I totally embraced it once “Animal Farm” was gonna go in that direction.