English actor, director, and motion-capture pioneer Serkis is a thrill-seeker in life\u2014he writes here of his successful \u201csolo assault\u201d on the Matterhorn\u2014and also in his art. His attitude is distilled in his initial response to being asked to play Ulysses Klaue in Marvel\u2019s Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): \u201cCharismatic South African villain who gets his arm chopped off? Count me in.\u201d Such an adventuresome spirit can\u2019t be expected to write a straightforward memoir or even to give it a straightforward title. (This one plays on Gollum\u2019s catchphrase, \u201cmy precious.\u201d) Periodically interrupting Serkis\u2019 chronological account of his life, which began in a London suburb in 1964, are scripts in which the author converses with a handful of characters he has played on-screen. These exchanges tend to take the book to darker places than the good-natured Serkis seems to want to go\u2014e.g., British serial killer Ian Brady says to Serkis, who played Brady in the TV movie Longford (2006), \u201cYou can\u2019t face living with who you are, so you have to leech off the lives of others, who are so much more truthful than you.\u201d Might it be that, as is posited on the book\u2019s last page, these scripted interactions are included because Serkis doesn\u2019t \u201ctrust that his own story is interesting enough?\u201d That would have been a fear unfounded. Serkis is an engagingly self-effacing chronicler, and readers will likely leave this book seeing the humor, as the author seems to, in the fact that this mainstay of multiple film franchises hawked Socialist Worker newspapers on the streets of London not long before his acting career took him to otherworldly places.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
English actor, director, and motion-capture pioneer Serkis is a thrill-seeker in life\u2014he writes here of his successful \u201csolo assault\u201d on the Matterhorn\u2014and also in his art. His attitude is distilled in his initial response to being asked to play Ulysses Klaue in Marvel\u2019s Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): \u201cCharismatic South African villain who gets his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}