The actor who apes the apes

last updated 8 January 2015

Peter Elliott is an expert at reversing evolution, said Nick Liptak in The New Yorker. For 25 years, Elliott has been Hollywood’s go-to actor whenever a director needs a human being to portray an ape. He got his start in the mid-’80s on the film Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. Casting for Silverbeard, Tarzan’s adopted ape father, producers went through more than 40 actors before becoming enamored of Elliott’s screen test. To be sure he was right for the part, they sent him 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,” Elliott recalls. In full costume, he fooled the real simians, and the roles came flooding in. He played the ape Simba in Gorillas in the Mist, the title role in the film Buddy, and consulted on Congo.

There are, he says, tricks to his trade. “You’ve got to try and lose the human leg length. You can do that by dropping the crotch. For the behavior, for the look of it, you need to learn all the sounds and faces. 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.”