Andy Serkis Is Having a Conversation with Gollum — and This Time It's a Memoir
There is a peculiar literary tradition of actors who cannot stop being their most famous characters — not on stage, but on the page. Andy Serkis, whose memoir My Pressures arrives from Mariner Books on November 3, has taken this premise to its logical, possibly surreal conclusion: a dialogue between the man and the creatures he became.
The title plays on Gollum's famous hiss — My precious — which tells you something about Serkis's relationship to self-seriousness. The book promises, in the publisher's rather breathless words, 'a genre-defying conversation between actor and character, imagination and reality.' Which is a polite way of saying: Gollum, King Kong, Caesar the ape, and the dark machinery of the Star Wars franchise are going to have opinions about Andy Serkis of Middlesex.
Whether this proves to be genuinely experimental literature or a very elaborate author Q&A is the question November will answer. Martin Amis spent his career arguing that the novel is the form that can do everything. He would have had something tart to say about cinema's most technically ambitious actor turning to memoir by way of his CGI creations. Then again, Amis never played Gollum under eighteen kilograms of motion-capture dots in the cold of New Zealand.
What makes My Pressures provisionally interesting is that Serkis built his entire career in the gap between bodies and images, between human and something else entirely. His Gollum remains perhaps the most consequential literary adaptation performance of the last quarter century — a creature described in language that was always unfilmable, rendered filmable through a kind of bodily sacrifice. Descent into Hell by Charles Williams — a novel of spiritual doubling and disintegration that Tolkien himself read and admired among the Inklings — offers a strange companion text: the idea that what we project outward eventually speaks back, sometimes with its own desires.
Serkis grew up between Baghdad and Middlesex, trained in a theatrical tradition that still involves Keats before lunch, and became the defining face of the post-human CGI era. If My Pressures works, it will be a book about the phenomenology of performance — what it means to lend your body to someone else's imagination, and whether anything distinctly yours survives the process. The question the publishing industry should be asking, but probably is not, is whether the dialogue format can sustain a full book, or whether it will begin to feel, around page 150, like a particularly ambitious press junket.
The Tolkien estate, one imagines, has opinions it is not yet sharing.
