Andy Serkis Quotes

I was living in Evanston, Illinois and I was taking theater classes down the street, and our theater school was kind of affiliated with an agency, and so I went on one audition for whatever that movie was, 'My Stepmother is an Alien' or whatever it was, and 'Roseanne' was my second audition.

When I'm reading a script and I see the word 'lumbering' I go, 'Oh, that's probably the part they want me to read for.'

I've never had an audition like that before. They don't let you know about anything on 'Mad Men,' because it's a spoiler for everybody. I thought I was on the right track when I was cracking everybody up.

I knew Jimmy Dean. He tested for 'Battle Cry'. Paul Newman tested for 'Battle Cry'. I did nine tests to finally get that role.

Actors look for characters. If they read a well-written character, and if they think the director's not an idiot, they're going to sign up and do some acting.

Eventually I got the call for 'Iron Man,' and I read sides that had nothing to do with what I did in the movie, and I performed it once while no one was in the room - it was videotaped, and I'm sure Shane Black was watching it from his helicopter or something. And then I got a call the next day that I was going down to shoot it.

I got an agent and went up for the part of my first film, Five Gates to Hell.

There were two auditions for 'The Social Network,' one with Aaron Sorkin and one with David Fincher. I was a nervous wreck. I was like, 'Okay, how do I hold the paper without my hands making it shake?'

I didn't audition for 'Fargo.' It was a straight offer.

Casting is really exciting. With 'Twilight,' I wasn't involved at all with the casting in the original. They kept me in the loop, which was great. They'd be like, 'Hey Kristen Stewart's gonna do it' and I was like, 'Really? Awesome.'

I auditioned for 'Avatar' in Australia. It was a 'blind' audition. I didn't know what the movie was about and whom it was for.

The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.

A lot of the time, I won't read the script until my second or third audition just 'cause a lot of the scripts are the same and the characters are the same.

Waiting is always a part of people involved in the film industry. Be it on the floor, in the make-up room or at home. All my life I have waited for a good role.

I've done a couple of castings... I've done an audition for 'The Hobbit.'

Jim Henson once allowed me to visit the Muppets on set and spent an entire day showing me how he and the other puppeteers performed Kermit and all the characters! After that, I was lucky enough to work with both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on many fun animation projects and learned so much from them.

I think acting is boring because you have to sit for a long time. And being a director I am used to running around and being busy on sets. I lack the actor software.

'Hotel For Dogs' was fun for my family, but it was kind of hard to get in the audition room for 'Jennifer's Body' after that, you know? But I think the roles find me, in a way.

I love to choose the right actors. It's kind of a pleasure to work with them and watch them imbue your concepts that you write.

I was shooting for 'Maaya' when I got a call from John Abraham's office. They told me about the film and asked if I could audition. But since I was shooting, I recorded my audition and sent them the tapes. The next thing I know, I was on board.

Many of the characters I play are talkative - 'Oopiri' for instance - so the dubbing process gets longer.

I had actually sent an audition tape for Simon Pegg's movie 'Hot Fuzz,' which came to nothing. Four years after the film released, out of nowhere, I got a call saying the producers of 'Game of Thrones' wanted me to play Hodor after they had seen that particular tape.

There were two things that became apparent, pretty quickly into the process. One was that the muscles didn't take as much reconditioning as I thought they would. It was more like voice acting than I thought it would be. You're using your whole body and there are things that are different, but when you are doing a character, even in the booth, nobody is watching but my face will do different things when I do different characters.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

The character of Brent Spiner. We certainly collaborate on the concept of that, but he basically writes the script, then it's sort of a combination of his voice and my voice.