He might be the star of some of the most famous and successful film franchises of the last twenty years, but only recently has he done so without wearing a motion capture suit. Ever since his industry-changing turn as the corrupted Gollum in the acclaimed Lord of the Rings series, Andy Serkis has become known as the progenitor of a new cinematic medium. While other artists would have rejected being so cornered, Serkis has instead embraced this role and chose to instead legitimize mo-cap acting, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for future artists and actors. Seeing as he more or less changed modern blockbuster filmmaking, Serkis more than deserves a sizable net worth.
Andy Serkis’s Net Worth As Of 2018: $28 Million
While he’s been in numerous films, TV shows and voice-over projects since first debuting onscreen in 1989, the majority of Serkis’s wealth comes from the unique niche he’s carved out for himself as the godfather of motion capture performances. Ironically, this, in turn, has given him the opportunity to do more non-mo-cap work which cyclically helps lend more legitimacy to his innovative work in CGI animation. Outside of acting in skin-tight nylon, he’s also made money as a director, producer and film consultant. Most sources, including The Richest, Celebrity Net Worth, Know Net Worth and Richest Post, agree that his current net worth in 2018 is to the tune of $28 million.
Early Life
Serkis was born in Middlesex, England on April 20, 1964 to a teacher mother and a gynecologist father. Though he was raised primarily in Great Britain, his family took frequent excursions to his father’s homeland of Iraq. He originally attended Lancaster University to study visual art but took theater as a supplementary course because he wanted to design sets and posters. Even before he was an actor, he liked to perform as a student radio host for a local station. He was eventually asked to be an extra in a few performances which quickly snowballed into him having spoken, minor and soon major roles in the student plays. Having fallen in love with the craft, Serkis switched his studies entirely to acting.
1989-2003
For years following his graduation, Serkis became a regular face on the British theater circuit, joining a number of touring companies. He was best well known at this time for his Shakespearean work, specifically his roles in The Winter’s Tale and King Leer. Finally, in 1989, he took his first tentative steps into television acting. After a smattering of smaller roles, he took a recurring part on the series Streetwise, which he stuck with all the way through the show’s ending in 1992. Two years later, Serkis broke into the film scene with a small role in Royal Deceit, a star-studded reimagining of Hamlet.
His career began to pick up steam towards the end of the decade. While he mostly took small movie roles in this period, he was working with elite British actors and steadily making a name for himself in the industry. He got what could be considered his ‘big break’ in 1999 when he shocked audiences with his haunting portrayal of Bill Sikes in the TV movie of Oliver Twist. It wasn’t long after that when he was tapped to play the role that would recontextualize his career and redefine the limits of cinema.
2003-2012
Serkis’s iconic portrayal of Gollum turned Hollywood on its head and made him a household name overnight. He was so sympathetic in the role that it was considered legitimately controversial that he wasn’t nominated for an academy award. After Lord of the Rings ended, director Peter Jackson called Serkis back to play the title role in his 2005 remake of King Kong. Serkis also got to play a live-action character, letting mainstream audiences see non-CGI face for the first time. The Serkis-Jackson partnership didn’t end there as the two teamed up with Steven Speilberg for 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin.
That same year, Serkis became a co-founder of Imaginarium Studios, a production company that specializes in motion-capture filming and consulting. Serkis then returned to the role that made him famous for Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, something he was reportedly happy to do, and doubled as a unit director, which sparked in him an interest in directing. Throughout this period, he had many smaller projects that allowed him to do live-action work, such as the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the failed franchise-starter Inkheart, and his lauded comedy with Simon Pegg Burke and Hare.
2012-Present
In 2011, Serkis landed a role that would once again reinvent his career. As the charismatic ape Ceasar in the Rise of the Planet of the Apes series, Serkis once again proved that performance capture was not merely a CGI gimmick and was a real, collaborative method of bringing a character to life. At this point, he was also known as a franchise player whose technical and artistic input could elevate a good movie to a great one. So much so that J.J. Abrams felt comfortable giving Serkis the part of Supreme Leader Snoke, the enigmatic and animated dark overlord of the new Star Wars trilogy he had been tasked with jump starting.
Around the same time, Serkis played the classic comic villain Ulysses Klaue in Avengers: Age of Ultron, a role he followed up on in the cultural phenomenon Black Panther. It was the first time he’d been given the opportunity to act without performance capture in a major franchise. Most recently, Serkis directed and stared in Mowgli, the non-Disney live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book, due for release in October 2018. He also is reportedly signed on to do two more of the well-received Spielberg-Jackson Tintin films.