Up to this point the trailers and promotional material for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" have not shown a single shot of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the film's main antagonist, Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the latter finally got the opportunity to give fans a small insight into his character.
Like all dynamic villains, Serkis describes Snoke not as a plain black-and-white villain but as a character that has his own desires and weakness.
"Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful," Serkis says. "Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which believes his true agenda, I suppose," Serkis explains.
Serkis, who pioneered the modern age era of motion-capture with his roles as Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" and Caesar in the rebooted "Planet of the Apes" franchise, also admits that even he didn't exactly know what Snoke looked like as they were already filming the scenes.
The actor explains, however, that Supreme Leader Snoke is very tall and that the design of the character's face could not be properly achieved with physical prosthetics, which is partly why the studios utilized motion capture technology instead. Serkis describes Snoke's face to have an "idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure."
It is also stated that Snoke's looks and designs changed not only during development but even during production on the film as they were shooting, so it is unlikely that any leaked concept art will match the final appearance seen in the film. It is heavily speculated however that Snoke will bear a snake-like face, although Lucasfilm has yet to confirm this.
Serkis also confirms that there are only two major motion-capture characters in the film: Supreme Leader Snoke and Maz Kanata, played by Lupita Nyong'o. Every other alien will primarily played with physical costumes and prosthetics.
"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" opens this Dec. 18.
