Following on from Harrison Ford's interview yesterday, EW's new "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" double-issue also boasts one with Andy Serkis who plays the mysterious and still unseen Supreme Leader Snoke in the film.
His voiceover was heard in the first trailer, and apparent but unconfirmed sketches leaked online this week suggesting he might be a snake or devil-like creature of some kind. Whatever he looks like, he is said to play a key figure over the course of the next few films - potentially the Emperor Palpatine style puppet master in the background.
Nevertheless, the most serious information has emerged today from Serkis' own mouth. The motion-capture pioneer says he didn't even know what Snoke even looked like until after he was done filming:
"It's the first time I've been on set not yet knowing what the character's gonna look like. I mean talk about secrecy."
Serkis adds that the character could never be accomplished through practical effects:
"No, no. The scale of him, for instance, is one reason. He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design – you couldn't have gotten there with prosthetics. It's too extreme. 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]."
Snoke, like Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata, will be a 100% digital character in a film that otherwise prides itself on use of practical make-up and effects. Snoke also talks about the character's backstory:
"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."
Nyong'o has also spoken about her Maz Kanata character, a diminutive alien who appears on the film's official poster, and her backstory:
"Her history is that she was a pirate for a long time. 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. 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."
"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" opens December 18th.
Source: EW