Andy Serkis looks so much like Michael Sheen that even his daughter mistook the 'Planet of the Apes' star for her dad.
Andy Serkis says he can't escape Michael Sheen comparisons
Michael and Andy have been mistaken for each other for years due to their similar looks, and the 57-year-old actor - who is world renowned for his performance capture work - can recall one incident when Michael's child Lily, his daughter with ex-partner Kate Beckinsale, ran up to him at an airport thinking he was her father getting off a flight.
In an interview in The Guardian newspaper, Andy was asked by a reader if anyone has ever asked him for Sheen’s autograph, to which replied: "Ha! No. But a funny thing did once happen … I got off a plane coming back from LA and the child of Kate Beckinsale ran up to me, thinking I was her dad. I’d love to do something with Michael."
Andy also gets told he looks like Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the former Manchester United player and manager.
He added: "There’s a Man United manager too – Ole Gunnar Solskjær – who people have said I look like."
Michael has also had his own experiences of mistaken identity.
In 2019, the 'Frost/Nixon' star revealed he was once “chased down the street” by Andy’s fans who were shouting “Gollum! Gollum!”, his character from 'The Lord of the Rings' films.
Sheen was once asked who would portray him in the story of his life, and he answered by saying: "Simon Pegg, Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis would play it in rotation as I already spend a fair amount of time being asked if I’m one or other of them and this would nicely add to the confusion!"
In The Guardian Q A, Andy was also asked if he was interested in taking on a role that acknowledged his ethnicity.
The actor's mother, Lylie Weech, was half Iraqi and half English teacher and his father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi-Armenian gynaecologist.
Revealing his ambition to tell his dad's inspiring real-life story on screen, Andy said: "One of my great ambitions is to create an autobiographical exploration of my father. He was from Iraq and, around about the time I was born in the mid-60s, helped build the Ibn Sina hospital in Baghdad with three other people.
"My mother brought my three older sisters – who’d all grown up in Baghdad – and me to live in England, but we would go back to Baghdad every year. During the Gulf War, there was a big diaspora of Iraqi people who escaped, so I have a lot of relatives and cousins who ended up in New Zealand, Canada, Los Angeles and Europe. I’m very much searching to tell a story about the existence of the Ibn Sina hospital. It was taken over by the Ba’ath party under Saddam Hussein’s regime and ended up being in the Green Zone used by the American military."
Tagged in Andy Serkis Michael Sheen