Andy Serkis talks Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

News
By published

Another day, another new juicy snippet of Star Wars: The Force Awakens info. Most of the golden nuggets of intrigue we've received of late have come from director JJ Abrams and his heroes Harrison Ford, John Boyega and Daisy Ridley.

But it's high time we hear from the villains and Andy Serkis - who will be portraying Supreme Leader Snoke (master of one Kylo Ren) - has revealed some details to Entertainment Weekly on what we can expect from his character. "Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful. Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose."

Much like Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata, Snoke will be a motion-capture creation. Serkis, who is known as a motion-capture guru, admits that he didn't even know what his character looked like at first. "When we first started working on it, he [Abrams] had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance... That’s been fascinating. And in the meantime I’ve been able to see the look and design of the character grow and change as the performances change. So it’s been really exciting in that respect."

"He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design – you couldn’t have gotten there with prosthetics. It’s too extreme", Serkis continued. "Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure. You could never have done it [in real life.]" Sounds menacing!

Directed by Abrams and starring Serkis, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac and Gwendoline Christie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is released in UK cinemas on December 17 2015 before opening in US theatres a day later. Check out our analysis of the international trailer below...

Amon Warmann
Amon Warmann

Amon is a contributing editor and columnist for Empire magazine, but is also a Film and TV writer for GamesRadar+, Total Film, and others. He has also written for NME, Composer Mag, and more, along with being a film critic for TalkSport. He is also the co-host of the Fade to Black Podcast, and a video mashup creator. Can also do a pretty good Bane impersonation.