ShareThisBy BETSY PICKLE
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
1930s movie villains would have nothing to fear from the "dirty rat" Andy Serkis voices in the animated film "Flushed Away."
"He's hopeless really," Serkis says of Spike, a rat who works for the crime boss of underground London's underworld in "Flushed Away." "He thinks he's a really big gangster. He thinks he is the Jimmy Cagney of the rat world.
"But he basically lives at home with his mother. She irons his suit and washes his underwear for him and pats him on the head and sends him off to be a good gangster."
Specifically, Spike tries to keep pampered Roddy (Hugh Jackman) and resourceful Rita (Kate Winslet) in line for boss Toad (Ian McKellen) in "Flushed Away."
Roddy is a pet rat from a ritzy neighborhood who accidentally ends up in the sewer with the hoi polloi. All he wants is to get home, but that becomes difficult once he falls afoul of Toad.
"It's quite a cool message, you know _ this posh rat who supposedly has everything falls down the toilet, ends up in a different world and actually learns ... back up in his isolated world ... he doesn't really have anyone to relate to," says Serkis. "That's a really cool thing for kids to pick up on _ the normality of all the other characters and what they're going through, whether it's hard or not, they're living; they're really alive."
"Flushed Away" is the first computer-animated film from Aardman Features, best known for award-winning stop-motion-animated films and the beloved characters Wallace and Gromit.
"I've been a big fan of their work for years," says Serkis, a British actor who earned his own place in film history as the movement model and voice of Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. "You always have compassion for all their characters, even the dark-side characters."
Serkis, 42 and a father of three, is impressed with the direction animated films have been taking.
"I think scripts (for animated films) are getting wittier and wittier actually," he says. "They tend to have a lot going on for really wide-ranging audiences so kids get a lot out of them but also they're great family films. I think 'Flushed Away' does that."
"Flushed Away" marks the first time Serkis has used his own voice in an animated feature, though he's done shorts and he once guest-starred on an episode of "The Simpsons."
Usually, actors doing voice work for animated films record their roles without interacting with other actors, but Serkis got a slight break from solitude.
"I was very fortunate, and I got to work with Bill Nighy on my first day," says Serkis. That was their only time together, though Serkis' Spike bosses Nighy's dimwitted Whitey around throughout the film. Serkis and Nighy (Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest") also co-star in the British kid spy flick "Stormbreaker," but they're never on screen at the same time.
Serkis co-stars with "Flushed Away" leading man Jackman in "The Prestige," also currently in theaters. In "The Prestige," Serkis plays the assistant to Nikola Tesla, who's played by rock legend David Bowie.
"You're sitting down at 6 o'clock in the morning in the makeup chair, and David Bowie's next to you, and that's a bit of a reality check," he says. "You go, 'Oh my God.'
"But he's such a nice, down-to-earth man and great fun to work with, and obviously he's immensely talented. His performance as Tesla is great in 'Prestige.' It's just brilliant. It was really nice to hang out."
Whether he's working with legends like Bowie and McKellen or shooting on location in Prague or New Zealand, Serkis is experiencing a life far removed from his childhood in West London and Baghdad.
"My Dad's Iraqi," he says. "I used to go and visit him. My older sisters were all brought up there for their first few years, and then my mum decided that she wanted to come home to bring us up in England. This was back in the '60s and '70s.
"So we moved back to the UK, and he carried on working as a doctor where he'd set up."
Serkis hasn't been back to Iraq lately.
"The last time I was there was when I was 14, and it was starting to get pretty hairy then with the Iraq-Iran War. I have lots of cousins there still. Some have left. ... But obviously it's a very, very difficult situation for the ones who are still there."
