Owen Teague Went to ‘Ape School’ to Pull Off a Spectacular Transformation in ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’
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A chimpanzee rests its chin on its hand, looking like the ape version of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” “There’s a picture of me somewhere sitting in that exact same position,” Owen Teague tells me before assuming a similar pose, swinging his long arm up and brushing his palm against the bottom of his face.
“There’s something very soft about the way that chimps move. Their hands are just super loose.”
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He’s no zoologist, but Teague, the 25-year-old star of next month’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” knows a thing or two about animal behavior. After landing the lead role of Noa, a chimpanzee living in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have surrendered their apex predator status, Teague spent days at a Florida ape sanctuary. That’s where he got up close and personal with primates — well, except for the orangutans. “Man, they smell terrible,” he says. “Our evolutionary predecessors were stinky guys.”
It’s a Wednesday morning in March, and we’re walking through the American Museum of Natural History, encircled by capuchin monkeys, lemurs, gorillas, even an orangutan hanging from a tree branch. Teague doesn’t need to worry about any nose-curling odors. The animals on display in the Hall of Primates are models or long-dead specimens, but their proximity is reminding Teague of the lengths he went to to transform himself into a chimp. That metamorphosis required a six-week stint in “ape school,” where he and the rest of the film’s cast worked with a movement teacher to get in touch with their simian sides.
“They’re very economical,” Teague says, hunching his shoulders and assuming the posture of a chimp. “You don’t see them sit down and then shift around to get comfy. They plant themselves in the exact right place and stay there. They’re so physically present. Humans are always kind of shifting our feet and doing stuff with our hands.”
And because apes also walk around on their knuckles, the cast was outfitted with extensions made from sawed-off crutches. They learned to run on them, using their arms to propel their bodies forward. “When apes hit the ground it’s like — Boom! Boom! Boom!” Teague says. “So it can be painful.”
Teague battled elbow pain until he convinced the designers to tweak the prototype by adding more springs. He got so comfortable using the extensions that he nicked them after filming ended. “I was living in Crown Heights, and I would take them out at night and run around the neighborhood on all fours. And, of course, it’s Brooklyn, so everybody’s just like, ‘Eh, whatever.’”
Even in anything-goes New York City, this kind of behavior might seem insane — or at least immature. But Teague’s enthusiasm is truly sweet and his love of his work irresistible. Castmates admired his full-throttle commitment to embodying Noa. Kevin Durand, who plays a scheming bonobo in the film, remembers meeting Teague for the first time on set after he had just finished a scene. “Without breaking character, Owen started moving towards me like an ape, hiding behind things and acting like he was trying to figure out what I was. He was inviting me to play. It was like ‘Here, take this blue pill.’”
After a series of acclaimed turns in indies like “To Leslie” and “Montana Story” — along with stints on “Bloodline” and “Black Mirror” — Teague is graduating to the big leagues. In “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” a potential summer blockbuster, he’s front and center. Well, at least a version of Teague is there on-screen — a digitally altered one in which his angular face and “spaghetti-noodle physique” (his words) are nearly unrecognizable under CGI fur and muscle.
As we move across the room to examine a diagram charting Homo sapiens’ journey out of the land of apes and into a different kind of Darwinian jungle, I ask Teague if he’s upset that few who watch his new movie will know he’s the man behind the chimp.
“I’m fine maintaining my anonymity,” he says. “I want to keep being a normal person and going out to get coffee without being recognized. Fame scares me.”
But Teague hopes people understand that all the soaring special effects in the world wouldn’t be enough if there weren’t a strong performance to build upon. That was a frustration for Andy Serkis, Teague says, whose turn as Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was a breakthrough in the kind of performance-capture work that Teague has spent months doing.
At its core, the technology involves capturing an actor’s movements and expressions via high-tech sensors, at which point visual effects artists fill in the rest, turning the performers into mythical creatures and animals without requiring the use of makeup and prosthetics. But it took time for audiences to fully understand that a character like Gollum wasn’t simply a collection of pixels: Reviews of the “Lord of the Rings” movies often credited Serkis with just providing the voice of Gollum instead of creating the character. “It’s a total misunderstanding,” Teague says. “Because Andy played Gollum. That’s all him.”
Serkis went on to play the central role of Caesar, a chimpanzee who leads a successful revolt against humanity, in the three prior “Planet of the Apes” films. The new movies are set hundreds of years later, but take place in the same cinematic universe, with Teague’s character intended to anchor a fresh trilogy. That’s assuming “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is a hit, of course.
“We had a lot of pressure on us to find the person who can carry this trilogy,” says Wes Ball, the film’s director. And there was something about Teague that convinced Ball he’d found his Noa. “We needed someone who is kind of innocent and naive but can also be tough and strong.” He adds, “It was some kind of miracle that we met Owen.”
When Teague was 7, his parents took him to see “King Kong,” the remake of the famous monster movie in which Serkis played the giant gorilla. He was transfixed. “I had so much empathy for that character,” Teague says. “I was so affected by Kong. And after my mom explained to me that it wasn’t just a guy in a suit — it was a performance that had been digitally captured — I was like, ’I want to do that.’”
Teague grew up in Tampa, Fla. His dad was a professor who researched mental health and substance abuse, and his mom was a jazz singer who gave up performing after he was born. Teague appeared in local theater but found himself also drawn to music, believing for a time that might be his calling. He still collects instruments, teaching himself to play new ones. “I want to buy a cello, but those things are expensive,” he says.
As he grew up, Teague began to take acting more seriously, auditioning around and landing an episode of “NCIS: Los Angeles” and a supporting role in the “It” films. He was often cast in horror movies, playing creepy adolescents. “I’m not built like a tree or ridiculously handsome like Chris Hemsworth,” he says. “I don’t know what it is about me. But I’m able to play these people with conviction.”
Teague got into NYU, but when his agent called to tell him he could either go to college or star opposite Gary Oldman in a horror film called “Mary,” he chose the second option. “It was terrible,” Teague says of the movie they ended up making.
But better projects soon followed, and the young actor distinguished himself with his intense commitment to his roles. For “The Stand,” a 2020 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s bestseller in which Teague portrayed a disturbed teen, he scanned incel forums to better understand his character’s psychological torment.
Still, he had a tendency to put himself down in his quest for perfection. “I was very hard on myself,” Teague says. “I always felt like I hadn’t given enough — that I had another, better take in me every time I’d do a scene.”
In the museum this morning, Teague says he doesn’t just see “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” as a gateway to bigger movies. The experience has made him appreciate a looser approach to acting. “Now I throw stuff against the wall,” he says. “It might not be right, it might be terrible, but I’m trying stuff and not worrying so much about if it’s good.”
He smiles as he talks about this gutsy style he’s embracing. “Maybe my career is gonna tank in a few years because I’m suddenly turning in just off-the-wall performances,” he says. “You’ll be like, ‘Well, I know what happened there.’”
But “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” has changed things in other, unintended ways. After finishing the film, Teague was shooting a scene for “The Rivals of Amziah King,” a crime thriller that stars Matthew McConaughey, when he realized he hadn’t shed Noa’s skin.
“The director comes up to me and he’s like, ‘I don’t want to make you self-conscious, but you walk like an ape.’ For maybe a month afterward, I’d catch myself itching like a chimp or eating like one or just having these facial tics. I guess it stuck.”
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