Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes stars explain why “ape school” was required before filming

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes features a cast of VFX apes played by human actors and, to make the ape characters feel more believable, one of the movie’s stars revealed that the cast had to attend ape school for six weeks.

“All the actors playing apes went to Ape School for six weeks before shooting,” Owen Teague explained to The New York Times. “We did stunt training, physical conditioning and our coach, Alain Gauthier, had us moving and improvising in our ape form, just letting the character come out of you.

“Andy told me to think about where I was carrying tension, when Noa is feeling pressure from his dad, or how he stands when he feels he can do something. Essentially how to use my body as an expression of what was going on internally.”

Teague, who plays the young chimpanzee hunter Noa, went on to explain how he decided to perfect his character’s specific way of moving.

“Caesar grew up with humans, and that changed how he moved and thought of himself. Noa has never met a human, he doesn’t even know what they are. The clan calls them Echoes, and they are horrifying, like rats. I wanted Noa to feel like a chimp who has grown up with other chimps, so I tried to quadruped as much as possible, keep uprightness to a minimum,” he said.

During an interview with CBR, Gauthier, the movie’s movement coordinator, went into more detail on how he got the actors prepared for their journey to become apes.

“I work with the actors, and my training is physical theater, so it’s all about starting with movement,” Gauthier said. “What I do is I guide the actors into a good two weeks of movement training and exercises to get them to become very aware of their bodies. There’s a lot of group exercises, there’s a lot of individual exercises, exercises that help with coordination, coherence. But, ultimately, to create an empty vessel, to have an actor that is now a master of his body, and has dropped all the conditioning that could be in the way of having a pure character come out of this.”

The coordinator added that the most important aspects he had to teach the actors were the “particularities of being an ape, physiologically, and movement-wise” as they already knew who their characters were on paper.

Once Gauthier taught the cast how to move like apes, they would blend that part of the character to one from the script and the “fusion of both worlds suddenly creates the character that you end up meeting.”

While audiences cannot attend the same ape school the cast did, director Wes Ball has confirmed that the home release of the movie will contain an alternate version of the movie that has no VFX effects so audiences can see the actors’ ape training at work.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now in theaters. You can find out if Noa is related to Cesar, read our ending explainer, and check out our interview with Ball about fan theories.