Andy Serkis Just Delivered the Most Honest Answer Yet on AI Replacing Gollum

Andy Serkis has spent nearly three decades proving that motion capture is not a shortcut, it is a craft. From Gollum to Caesar to Snoke, he has built an entire career around characters that only exist because of the physical and emotional work happening underneath the digital skin. That legacy is exactly why Hollywood keeps turning to him whenever the conversation about artificial intelligence and performance capture heats up again.

Right now, Serkis has plenty of reason to be thinking about both. He is stepping behind the camera to direct ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,’ a film set between the events of ‘The Hobbit’ and the original trilogy, and reportedly slated for release in December 2027 according to ComicBook.com. The project brings back a role that made him famous, only this time he is also shaping how far new technology is allowed to reach into that world.

That tension is exactly what Variety pushed him on, asking directly whether AI could eventually replace performances like Gollum. Serkis did not dodge the question. “So there are elements of the character that could work, but at the end of day we’re talking about storytelling, and storytelling and drama is what happens between actors, and performance capture, obviously, is an actor’s authored technology,” he said, adding that he does not believe the full range of an actor’s choices across an entire script could ever be completely replicated by a machine.

It is a nuanced answer rather than a flat rejection of the technology, and that nuance shows up elsewhere in the same conversation. Serkis confirmed that ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ will use machine learning for some de-aging work on returning cast members, but insisted every shot is built the traditional way, blending prosthetics and miniatures with performance capture rather than generating characters wholesale. He also pointed back to Peter Jackson’s MASSIVE software from the original trilogy as an early example of AI being used well in filmmaking, framing today’s tools as an extension of that same lineage rather than something entirely new.

Serkis has been careful to draw a line between AI as a creative aid and AI as a replacement for labor, a distinction he has raised in interviews around the project. Speaking to Variety about the broader industry conversation, he argued that AI becomes a problem “when it becomes exploitative and people are not remunerated for the work that they’ve done,” language that reflects the same worries actors raised throughout the recent wave of Hollywood strikes.

The timing of his comments matters too, landing as fans continue to debate how far de-aging and digital de-aging tools should go in franchise filmmaking, especially with ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ asking so many familiar faces from 2001 to return decades later. Serkis’ answer suggests he sees a middle path, embracing the tools without handing over the authorship that made Gollum so unforgettable in the first place.

With production underway and a script that reportedly runs the full length of a feature film, Serkis seems determined to prove that performance capture still belongs to the performer. Do you think AI will ever get close to replicating what Serkis did with Gollum, or is that kind of authored performance simply irreplaceable?