The claim would appear to explain the seemingly needless CGI depiction of Snoke…

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Following last month’s release of Rian Johnson’s highly divisive The Last Jedi – the latest chapter in the Star Wars saga and the second installment since Disney took over – vexed fanboys vented a fair bit of anger in the direction of the rather underwhelming Supreme Leader Snoke, who was performed using motion capture by the godfather of the medium himself, Andy Serkis (Gollum in The Lord of the Rings series; Caesar in The Planet of  the Apes series).

After reviewing TLJ for Set The Tape, an interesting insight into how Snoke as we know him came to be was brought to my attention during a recent trip back home to the UK. Supposedly, way back during pre-production on The Force Awakens, Serkis signed on to portray not a CGI Snoke, but a male version of Maz Kanata, the goggle-eyed orange smuggler later played – still using mo-cap of course – by Lupita Nyong’o.

After the agreement was in place, however, Disney allegedly decided the production was in need of diversification and Maz’s gender was switched from male to female. Nyong’o was brought on board, Serkis was offered the role of Snoke, and the rest is cinematic history. Serkis would even go on to work directly with Nyong’o, helping her get to grips with the mo-cap technology – a first for the Oscar winning actress – and fine tune her performance on set.

While this apparent revelation remains unverified without a named sourced and is therefore up for debate, educated speculation and the gift of hindsight suggest it does actually make a fair bit sense.

During the earliest stages of what director J.J. Abrams foresaw as a primarily practical production, the intention was to bring Maz to life as a puppet. Serkis entering the equation would naturally have injected a mo-cap mindset into the character’s development. Such a shift may well have influenced Maz’s design and execution enough to logically keep moving in that direction, even after Serkis vacated the role.

On the flip side, many fans have pondered both the need for Snoke to be CGI, and the connotative wasting of a mighty mo-cap asset such as Serkis, when all Snoke does is sit in a chair for two films. When the question was put to Serkis himself prior to the release of TFA, he claimed, some might say rather unconvincingly, that it was not possible for the desired effects to have been achieved using prosthetics and make-up alone.

Most would argue they clearly could have been, even with the need to project Snoke as a large hologram or incorporate his “extreme” (it’s hardly that extreme) facial design. Perhaps Snoke only joined Maz as a mo-cap creation when Serkis ended up taking him on, as this was the British star’s preferred form of performance regardless of the character he was playing.

Working on the assumption that Serkis was indeed originally due to portray Maz instead of Snoke, it would be fair to suggest that Disney – in the process of (correctly) realising that TFA’s cast should be more diverse – would clearly not have wanted to lose a big name such as Serkis. Perhaps it did not even have a choice if both parties had a formal agreement in place. Either way, Serkis would certainly not have wanted himself and his team at Imaginarium Studios to be excluded from a gargantuan production such as the new Star Wars film.

With CGI and mo-cap adding little, if anything, to the character, Snoke may simply have been the compromise both Disney and Serkis desired. Ultimately, the dark lord’s depiction seems only to have contributed to his somewhat hollow nature, rounded off by poor writing and the lack of a predetermined story arc.

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Filed under: 2017, film, news Tagged: Andy Serkis, disney, j.j. abrams, lupita nyong'o, rian johnson, star wars, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, star wars: the last jedi, the force awakens, the last jedi, the lord of the rings, the planet of the apes