from the Talk of the Town section of this week's New Yorker: When the credits rolled on “Project Nim,” a documentary about the research chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky, audience members could be forgiven for not recognizing one of its stars. Peter Elliott, a British actor who played the chimp in some re-created footage, may have one of the most inconspicuous faces in the business.
Elliott’s career began in the late nineteen-seventies, during preproduction for “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.” The movie’s creative team had suffered a setback: the forty or so actors who had been hired to play Tarzan’s ape friends were not apelike enough. Producers tried out a mime wearing an animatronic ape costume, but determined that they needed another approach. Elliott’s screen test—very apelike—had caught the producers’ attention. They decided to send him on a fact-finding assignment for the production to the Institute for Primate Studies, at the University of Oklahoma. “The idea was to see if I could socially integrate into a group of chimps,” he said. “For the behavior, for the look of it, you need to learn all the sounds and faces.” He returned armed with techniques to present to the cast. The producers were thrilled, and he followed the success of “Greystoke” by playing some of the subsequent decades’ most iconic movie apes—Simba, in “Gorillas in the Mist”; Buddy, in “Buddy”—and becoming Hollywood’s go-to man for teaching others the craft, as he did for “Congo” and the (non-ape) creatures in last year’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Elliott, who is fifty-four, spent a few days last fall in the back yard of a mansion in Yonkers, shooting scenes for “Project Nim.” In his dressing room, he explained his approach. “You have to have a different breathing rhythm, a different backbone, a different weight. You treat it like a normal acting role. It’s Method chimping.”
High-quality costuming is important, too. For fifteen years, many of his suits have been built by Nik Williams and Tina Foster. “You’ve got to try and lose the human leg length,” Elliott said. He got down on all fours. “You can do that with the costume a little bit, by dropping the crotch.”
Elliott climbed onto an apple box and, when the camera rolled, began jumping up and down. “Do the gesture—do the signing,” Marsh called. Elliott began making high-pitched screams—one of five sounds that a performance in a film about apes might call for, along with grunts, hoots, whimpers, and barks. Afterward, Williams pulled two plastic tubes from a compartment in the costume’s stomach and plugged them into a metal cooling box—“like the ones race-car drivers use,” Elliott said.
Elliott excels at playing apelike humans, too: in “Quest for Fire,” he played a member of a semi-verbal prehistoric tribe, and he had the title role in “Missing Link.” He said, “Because you’re living in the ‘now,’ it’s almost completely stress-free.” He paused. “I’ve learned a whole lot more about people. It’s as though you’ve stripped away the cultural overlay.” Last year, he filmed an Italian Web TV series sponsored by the apéritif brand Crodino, in which he played a talking gorilla who casually dates a famous talk-show host. “A gorilla with his own sitcom,” he said. “It’s very Italian.”
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