Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes star Owen Teague shared his motion capture process playing new ape hero Noa and the challenges in defining the character.
“Yeah, the physical part of it almost came too naturally,” Teague said in an exclusive interview with ComicBook.com. “Not to brag, but it’s not, and I don’t say that as necessarily a good thing. I say that as I might be part chimpanzee. Apparently I walked like an ape now. People have said this. They were like, ‘Wow, you really stuck with it, huh?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not trying to do that. It’s just my walk.'”
Teague’s Noa is the main protagonist of the latest Apes installment set decades after the events of 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes. The latter movie saw the original ape hero Caesar (Andy Serkis) bring down the human Alpha-Omega mercenaries and lead the remaining apes to a peaceful oasis where he succumbs to his battle wounds. For Teague, the struggle in playing Noa was creating a voice different from Caesar.
“Noa’s not quite on that level, but finding a voice, not doing the gravelly Caesar thing, using my own voice and adding a little bit of rasp, but still keeping it high,” Teague continued. “It was scary because we’ve never heard an ape talk like that before. And I was like, I don’t know if this is going to work, where like, I open my mouth and people hear this come out, if people are going to be like, ‘That’s insane.’ Because when Caesar talks it’s not weird because he talks like this. Same goes for Kevin [Durand] who plays Proximus. He’s got a very guttural kind of thing happening. Noa doesn’t, which I think works for the character but also is an entirely new kind of ape. So that was tough. Not only finding it but also being okay with it and trusting the want.”
What is Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes about?
The official synopsis for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes reads: “Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic, franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.”
Teague headlines the latest Apes movie alongside Freya Allan (The Witcher), Peter Macon (The Orville), Eka Darville (Marvel’s Jessica Jones), Kevin Durand (Swamp Thing), Travis Jeffery (Preacher), Neil Sandilands (The Flash), Sara Wiseman (Power Rangers Dino Fury), Lydia Peckham (Cowboy Bebop), Ras-Samuel Welda’abzgi (The Clearing), William H. Macy (Mystery Men), and Dichen Lachman (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.).
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is scheduled for release in theaters on May 10.
