If you’re a young ape growing up in the jungle today and you have your sights set on Hollywood stardom — or at the very least, a bottom-feeding reality show on E! — you can forget about it.
Andy Serkis has probably stolen your job.
Had he been working today, Cheetah would be in a government banana line. J. Fred Muggs would be shaking a cup on the F train.
Serkis, 50, whose name has been synonymous with performance-capture technology since playing Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” reprises his role as superintelligent chimp Caesar in Friday’s “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.”
The movie picks up 10 years after 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” (Is someone at the studio getting paid by the prepositional phrase?)
The group of lab monkeys that escaped into the California forest at the end of the previous film has now established a crude society, with Caesar as its leader.
They’ve built shelters, they control fire and, in a true sign of primitivity, they still use AOL.
Most of the world’s humans have been wiped out by a simian flu, but when a small band of survivors (led by Jason Clarke and Keri Russell) encroaches on the apes’ territory in search of a hydraulic power plant, war threatens to explode between man and monkey.
In “Rise,” Serkis played Caesar from young chimp to an adult whose intelligence has been increased as a result of an experimental drug administered by a scientist (James Franco, seen in the second movie only in a brief flashback).
In “Dawn,” Caesar “is a much older, graver, statesmanlike figure, and he had a much different gait and way of being,” Serkis tells The Post. “There was a lot to explore.”
Much of Serkis’ character work was done at an “ape camp” held prior to production in the Vancouver woods.
There, Serkis and the approximately 50 actors who play the other apes worked with each other to establish how their characters would move and how they would communicate with each other.
“It was one of the most enjoyable parts of the job,” Serkis says. “We spent about three weeks doing these long, extended improvisations. It defined how the hierarchy would work, the familial generation. The whole way of being was established there.”
One development in the new film is that the apes can now speak. Caesar was seen uttering a sentence at the end of “Rise,” but in “Dawn,” he and his ape cohorts have linguistically advanced to the level of a small child. Or a Kardashian.
The damn dirty apes also communicate with sign language and grunts. Serkis says figuring all that out was the biggest challenge.
“We wanted to be careful not to make Caesar too articulate in terms of his evolution,” he says. “Part of what [director] Matt [Reeves] really loved and wanted to take on from ‘Rise’ was the evolutionary stage of these apes. It was very much an experimentation in terms of taking dialogue and stripping it down and finding a prototype way of speaking.”
“In ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes,’ the apes said only a few words,” Reeves says. “With this film, we show the apes at the dawn of their society, and learning to truly speak. Inevitably, the younger generation will be better with language than their parents, which leads to a very complicated portrait of the apes’ cultural order.”
What hasn’t changed since the previous movie is the fidelity to Serkis’ human performance that gets translated to the computer-generated Caesar.
Cameras record the actor’s movements and facial expressions, and that information is fed into a computer that spits out a simian character on the other end.
Serkis says he definitely recognizes himself in his hairy doppelgänger when he watches the movie.
In the 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes” starring Charlton Heston, the apes were portrayed by actors in costumes and masks.
For “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” the filmmakers shot much of the motion-capture footage in the field, as opposed to on a soundstage, as is usually the case.
Weta Digital, who produced the special effects, set up some 60 cameras in a British Columbia forest to capture the ape characters. More than 85 percent of the film was shot on location in Canada or outside of New Orleans.
“We were really cut off from civilization,” Russell says. “On location, it was quiet and beautiful, but at the same time, we were a massive production. It was unbelievable to me that they got those giant 3-D cameras and this epic moviemaking operation on these little trails in the rainforest.”
Performance capture has been a mainstay in Hollywood for more than a decade, playing roles in “King Kong,” “The Hobbit” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Despite its ubiquity, Serkis says some veteran actors still fear the technology.
“I think some of the older generation are still threatened by it,” he says. “It’s basically people who…don’t know anything about it and think that it’s somehow the end of the profession as they know it.”
Others in Hollywood have been more accepting, including those behind next year’s “Star Wars: Episode VII.”
Serkis will play an undisclosed role in the long-awaited sequel, and his London performance-capture company, the Imaginarium, will be “bringing to life” some of the universe’s creatures.
As performance capture progresses, it’s probably inevitable that a performer will receive awards recognition — perhaps even an Oscar nomination. While some have been lobbying for a separate
performance-capture category, Serkis disagrees.
“I don’t think there should be an alternative category,” he says. “Acting is acting in my eyes. Audiences are moved by characters, and characters are played by actors, and that’s the end of it.”
A third “Planet of the Apes” movie is reportedly in development, with Reeves onboard to co-write and direct, and Serkis returning as Caesar.
The unusual thing about this rebooted “Apes” series is that audiences already know where the story ends up — with a planet ruled by advanced simians and absent of humans, as shown in the 1968 movie.
Oh, well. We humans had a good run.