The actor behind the ape

The leader of the troops walks slowly through the ranks of soldiers, who part respectfully, as he looks at them with an expression that combines anger, pain and grim intent.

The scene comes from the latest in the series, "War for the Planet of the Apes," which opens on Friday and has generated laudatory reviews.

In "War," the fragile truce between humans and apes has given way, and we discover the sinister Colonel (played by Woody Harrelson), whose early actions set in motion a series of devastating events for both populations.

Caesar, the ape whose expressions we are watching via digital transformation as he reacts to the Colonel's murderous deeds and musters his forces, is played by British actor Andy Serkis.

In BoxOfficeMojo.com's ranking of actors by their ticket sales, Serkis is in the top 30, outflanking Brad Pitt and Daniel Radcliffe, among other famous names.

Yet, for most moviegoers, Serkis, 53, is probably neither a household name nor face, since he has specialized for more than a decade in creating roles through performance capture — a complex technology that records the movement and facial expressions of human actors and then painstakingly renders them digitally to create fantastical characters, like Caesar, Gollum and King Kong.

A 2011 campaign by 20th Century Fox to have Serkis nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" has not persuaded the academy or other major groups that performance-capture acting is, as Serkis put it during an interview here last month, "no different" from any other kind of acting.

An actor in a performance-capture role receives a script, works on psychology, emotions and motivation, and goes on set to be shot in exactly the same way as any other character, he said.

Except that your neighbor probably hasn't been embodying a chimp for the past five years, nor starring as Supreme Leader Snoke in "Star Wars" and Ulysses Klaue in " Aveng