Via Ew.com:

For those frustrated by the lack of information about Supreme Leader Snoke, Andy Serkis feels your pain. When he started work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the performance-capture character, he had no idea either.

“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!” the actor says.

Serkis is known for his pioneering work in motion-capture, merging human performance with digital characters to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films, King Kong, and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. (When he spoke with EW, he was having his dots applied and camera attached to start the day’s work on the third installment in that series, War of the Planet of the Apes.)

Each character is always a collaborative process with the filmmakers and visual effects artists, but in the case of Snoke, the look, voice, and movements evolved based on how far Serkis and director and co-writer J.J. Abrams could push the tech.

“When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance,” Serkis says.

Snoke kept changing, not only through principle photography, but even after. (So any “early concept art” that may be floating around online is probably nowhere near what this dark-hearted character looks like.)

Click below to read the full article.