Andy Serkis Says Playing Snoke in STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS Was His Biggest Acting Challenge

Andy Serkis has played many intriguing characters across blockbuster franchises like the chimpanzee Caesar in Planet of the Apes, the creature Gollum/Smeagol in The Lord of the Rings, the gigantic, iconic ape King Kong, and intergalactic villain Supreme Leader Snoke in the most recent Star Wars film trilogy.

While each of these took motion capture technology to bring them to life, one character was by far the most difficult for Serkis to channel, and it was the most surprising one to me.

Serkis explained on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, "Snoke is the one character that was a massive challenge, because he was evolving, in terms of writing, as we were going along. It was still unclear where he was at, what he actually represented in [The Force Awakens].”

Snoke was introduced in The Force Awakens as a Supreme Leader on the dark side of the Force. He was subsequently killed off in The Last Jedi, and fans later learned in The Rise of Skywalker that he was actually a strandcast- an artificially engineered, Force-sensitive being created by Darth Sidious (Palpatine) on Exegol.

And if Serkis was confused about the character’s motivations, he wasn’t the only one. The directionless storylines in the final three Skywalker Saga films were underwhelming and disappointing to the fans, who could tell that not a lot of thought went into the stories before they were made.

But Serkis did the best he could with what he had, which was still pretty good.