While we completely understand that many are happy to wait until the December release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to learn anything more, director J.J. Abrams and his cast are giving out intriguing little nuggets about some of the more mysterious characters from the new film we won’t meet until the movie lands. So you can choose to hold off or dig into some more information about Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata and Andy Serkis’ baddie Supreme Leader Snoke via Entertainment Weekly.
Nyong’o, for whom the film represented her first time in performance capture gear, is understandably limited in what she can say about the character. But as you might have been able to guess from the most recent TV spot{
But it’s Abrams who is, surprisingly more forthcoming about Maz herself. “Her history is that she was a pirate for a long time,” he says. “She’s lived over a thousand years. She’s had this watering hole for about a century, and it’s like another bar that you’d find in a corner of the Star Wars universe.” Don’t go expecting to discover everything about her at once, though. A lot is being held back for books or games. “All that backstory will be forthcoming. In the movie, you don’t learn these things, but I know that these are things that are coming out in other venues.”
While she was originally designed as a puppet, performance capture was decided as the best way to go for her. “Maz needed to look and feel and be just like one of those creatures. And given her mobility, and given the role that she played, it became clear that that was one creature where we should use the tool of CG,” Abrams explains. “But the performance was all Lupita. She was there on set, and we did capture sessions afterwards as well, and I can’t say enough about working with her.”
That’s also the case for Snoke, of whom we can expect to see nothing officially until the film opens. Even Andy Serkis didn’t know at first. “When we first started working on it, he 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,” he admits. And the character was able to evolve thanks to Serkis and his team’s skill with the motion capture technology and the effects wizards who would take the information and craft the man/creature/whatever. “We shot on set of course, and I was in the scenes I have with other actors, but the beauty of this process is you can go back and reiterate, keep informing and honing beats and moments. So J.J., after we shot last year, we’ve had a series of sessions where I’d be in London at The Imaginarium, my studio, while he’s been directing from LA, and we’ve literally been creating further additions and iterations to the character. 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.” Serkis also explains that thanks to the character’s size and facial structure, performance capture was the only way to feasibly bring him to life.
So that’s his look. But what about his outlook? “Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful,” Serkis says. “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.” For more from the interviews, head to EW’s site.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in case you might have forgotten, touches down on December 17 in the UK. For more on the movie, find our handy briefing here. And there will be plenty to read about when the latest Empire arrives near the end of the month…