The veteran Canadian actor explains how he got into character as Proximus Caesar

In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — the fourth installment of the Planet of the Apes film franchise — the Canadian actor Kevin Durand plays the tyrannical ruler Proximus Caesar, an ambitious and cunning bonobo who taught himself how to read so he could study the human race.

Similarly, in real life, Durand attended six weeks of “ape school” to learn how to walk, talk and act like an ape. Like its predecessors, Kingdom uses motion-capture technology that allows every ape character to be played by a real human being.

In an interview with Q‘s Tom Power, Durand says his crash course in aping involved working one-on-one with the Montreal movement coach Alain Gauthier, a former Cirque du Soleil performer with a background in science.

“I believe he’s a biologist as well,” Durand tells Power. “And so the way that he approached it was he broke down the apes anatomically … and basically presented to us the differences between the bonobo anatomy and the human anatomy.

“For instance, the hips are incredibly close to the floating ribs, so there’s no room for torsion. When we walk, we walk with arms and legs in opposition for balance — apes don’t have that ability…. Then you start to think about how the feet actually have thumbs. The way that you touch the ground is different.”

After getting into his “ape body,” Durand started thinking about his character’s voice. In his fourth week of working with Gauthier, the actor recalls speaking as Proximus for the first time.

“I answered as Proximus, and he was born,” Durand says in the voice of his character. “It was this organic thing. I never thought about where the voice was going to come from; it all came through the movement.”

From the time the script first came across his desk, Durand says he started imagining a history for Proximus that isn’t necessarily in the film. While his character is the film’s main antagonist, he doesn’t necessarily see him as being a villain.

“I saw this young bonobo who had this gift and a curse of being able to see beyond the perceived present,” Durand says. “He was able to really think about the future, which is not a common trait amongst animals — and some men.

“He realized that … humans never learn from their mistakes.They’re constantly doing the same thing. They’re killing the Earth and they’re killing each other over interpretations of words. They never seem to be able to escape this cycle that they’re in. And he became madly obsessed with that. He understood that if humans were ever to create a shift in the power paradigm on the planet Earth again — because at this point, apes are the rulers of the Earth, the apex predator — he’d end up back in a cage or in a laboratory, or he would end up being killed for meat or for his fur.”