Wild Things

There’s a new adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book on screens this month – and it’s going to hit a lot closer to home than you’d expect.

- Nidhi Gupta

Andy Serkis sits at the head of the empty conference room I walk into, behind rows and rows of unoccupied chairs. Alert and patient, he stares straight ahead, directly at the door. He’s so poised in the moment, I wonder for a split second if this is an AR version of the British polymath – until his face crinkles with a smile when I compliment him on the suit. “Yeah?” he says, in that famous voice and that famous British accent that’s stood many CGI demons in good stead. “I’m glad.”

A few hours earlier, Serkis (whom we last saw as the dastardly Klaue in Black Panther) walked onto a stage to thunderous applause, in front of 300 journalists from all over Asia at the Netflix See What’s Next event in Singapore. He was there to showcase his latest passion project, the live-action film Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle – which has reportedly been in the making for six years and, after multiple production houses pawned it off, releases this month on Netflix.

“I have a passion,” Serkis says, “for telling stories using metaphorical worlds and creatures about the human condition.” He’s done it as an actor – playing Gollum, Caesar, King Kong, Snoke – and now he’s pulling an Aesop, scripting 21st-century fables for the big screen.