“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” star Owen Teague reveals what was 'terrifying' about filming

"There's a learning curve to getting used to the technology of it all," the actor tells Entertainment Weekly.

EW's 2024 Summer Preview has dozens of exclusive looks at the most anticipated TV shows, movies, books, and music of entertainment's hottest season. Continue to visit ew.com through May for more previews of what you'll be watching, reading, and listening to in the months to come.

Owen Teague will never forget the moment he found out he landed the lead role in the next chapter of the Planet of the Apes saga — because it almost got him in a hairy driving situation.

"Oh my God, I was actually driving on the New Jersey Turnpike when I got the call, which is maybe the worst place to receive news of any kind," the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes star tells Entertainment Weekly. "I remember I was just about to go over the bridge into Staten Island to get into New York, and there's nowhere to really pull over. I'm on the phone with my agents, trying to find cash to pay the toll and they're like, 'You're going to be in the next Planet of the Apes,' and I was like, 'Oh, that's — How much [is the toll]? That's amazing!'"

Teague laughs at how he was "completely out of [his] own body with joy and shock." Once he paid the toll and the shock wore off, he could finally appreciate the gravity of the situation. "I've always wanted to do a movie like this — I've looked up to Andy Serkis from the time I was six years old," Teague says of the former Planet of the Apes star who played ape leader Caesar via motion capture. "He's a big part of why I'm an actor at all. Seeing him play King Kong [in the 2005 film] was really, really formative, so the fact that I get to do this is insane. It's such an honor."

Related: The lavish Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes introduces a new primate protagonist

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (in theaters May 10) is a continuation of Serkis' trilogy and picks up 300 years after 2017's War for the Planet of the Apes. In this distant future, apes have taken over but live in isolated colonies, while humans have regressed into feral creatures. When an ape king named Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) begins attacking and enslaving other ape clans, twisting the legendary Caesar's teachings for his own gain, a young chimp named Noa (Teague) goes on a harrowing journey with mysterious human Nova (Freya Allen) to fight for a future where apes and humans can co-exist once more.

Since Teague had never played an animal before, he knew he had a lot of work to do before the cameras started rolling. He spent a week watching and interacting with chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Florida called the Center for Great Apes, trained with a parkour instructor, and took lessons with a voice teacher to extend his vocal range. "That helped me get more in the body with the voice instead of how we talk as humans," he says. "For this, I really wanted to get it right."

But the most important part of his prep work was going to "ape school" with the other cast members playing primates. "There was a lot of improvisation that we did that taught us organically who we were playing," Teague says. "The wonderful thing about performance capture is that it's not that different from 'normal' acting, I guess, if you call it that. It's really the same thing. You have this other dimension that you're working in too, which only adds to the freedom of it. People get caught up in the fact that it's technology and that there's some animation involved, but at the core of it, it's the same thing."

After months of training, Teague felt prepared to go into the first day of filming. But there was some monkey business during his very first scene that gave him pause. "The first scene we shot is when Freya and I are walking down the beach," Teague says. "I watched that scene back and I'm like, 'Yeah, Noa's not ... it's not quite right yet. I'm still figuring it out.' And [director Wes Ball] was like, 'Yeah, we joke about that.'"

Related: Planet of the Apes director sets the stage for Kingdom and 'a lot more story to be told'

Teague laughs about how brutally honest Ball was in that moment. "Which is good. You want that," he adds. "And it's one of the reasons I love him. But it was intimidating. It's terrifying to lead a movie like this. So there was a learning curve. And there's a learning curve to getting used to the technology of it all too. You've got this thing on your face and these dots covering you and you're in spandex, but after a couple days, you forget that it's there."

Despite that somewhat rocky start, Teague couldn't be happier with how it all turned out in the end. "The entire six months of being in Australia with the crew and with Wes and everybody involved was, this sounds like an exaggeration, but it was really the greatest six months of my life," he says. "I developed such close relationships with everybody there and felt so fulfilled in the work that we were doing. It reminded me of why I became an actor. It brought the joy back to the work that sometimes you lose. It was really what I needed to do."

Teague was so inspired by the "beautiful experience" on set that he began documenting it with his own personal camera — and he's sharing those photos exclusively with EW.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

"I was running around set, because we'd have these times when there would be clean plates where they'd have to shoot the scene without any of the actors there, or resetting, or going to another setup or whatever, and I would have a few moments free," he says. "I brought my dad's old film camera from 1970-something to set every day with me, and shot eight or nine rolls of film over the course of the production — partially because I like shooting 35 millimeter, and partially because it felt safer than just taking pictures on my phone as things can be strict with that."

He laughs again as he admits that he found a way to work around any spoiler photo security policies. "I was like, 'Well, if it's film, then it's okay, right?'" Teague says. "At the end of it, I realized I had this documentation of the entire production. Literally, there's photos from day one, and then there's photos from day 70, 80, whatever, on the last day."

Check out more of Teague's behind-the-scenes photos from set below:

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.